And as she had by no means such fine taste and insight in theological teaching as in costume, the Rev. Amos Barton seemed to her a man not only of learning—­that is always understood with a clergyman—­but of much power as a spiritual director.  As for Milly, the Countess really loved her as well as the preoccupied state of her affections would allow.  For you have already perceived that there was one being to whom the Countess was absorbingly devoted, and to whose desires she made everything else subservient—­namely, Caroline Czerlaski, nee Bridmain.

Thus there was really not much affectation in her sweet speeches and attentions to Mr. and Mrs. Barton.  Still their friendship by no means adequately represented the object she had in view when she came to Milby, and it had been for some time clear to her that she must suggest a new change of residence to her brother.

The thing we look forward to often comes to pass, but never precisely in the way we have imagined to ourselves.  The Countess did actually leave Camp Villa before many months were past, but under circumstances which had not at all entered into her contemplation.

Chapter 5

The Rev. Amos Barton, whose sad fortunes I have undertaken to relate, was, you perceive, in no respect an ideal or exceptional character; and perhaps I am doing a bold thing to bespeak your sympathy on behalf of a man who was so very far from remarkable,—­a man whose virtues were not heroic, and who had no undetected crime within his breast; who had not the slightest mystery hanging about him, but was palpably and unmistakably commonplace; who was not even in love, but had had that complaint favourably many years ago.  ’An utterly uninteresting character!’ I think I hear a lady reader exclaim—­Mrs. Farthingale, for example, who prefers the ideal in fiction; to whom tragedy means ermine tippets, adultery, and murder; and comedy, the adventures of some personage who is quite a ‘character’.

But, my dear madam, it is so very large a majority of your fellow-countrymen that are of this insignificant stamp.  At least eighty out of a hundred of your adult male fellow-Britons returned in the last census are neither extraordinarily silly, nor extraordinarily wicked, nor extraordinarily wise; their eyes are neither deep and liquid with sentiment, nor sparkling with suppressed witticisms; they have probably had no hairbreadth escapes or thrilling adventures; their brains are certainly not pregnant with genius, and their passions have not manifested themselves at all after the fashion of a volcano.  They are simply men of complexions more or less muddy, whose conversation is more or less bald and disjointed.  Yet these commonplace people—­many of them—­bear a conscience, and have felt the sublime prompting to do the painful right; they have their unspoken sorrows, and their sacred joys; their hearts have perhaps gone out towards their first-born, and they have mourned over the irreclaimable dead.  Nay, is there not a pathos in their very insignificance—­in our comparison of their dim and narrow existence with the glorious possibilities of that human nature which they share?