Shelton knew that she had many interests; she was never really idle, from the time (7 A.M.) when her maid brought her a little china pot of tea with a single biscuit and her pet dog, Tops, till eleven o’clock at night, when she lighted a wax candle in a silver candlestick, and with this in one hand, and in the other a new novel, or, better still, one of those charming volumes written by great people about the still greater people they have met, she said good-night to her children and her guests.  No!  What with photography, the presidency of a local league, visiting the rich, superintending all the poor, gardening, reading, keeping all her ideas so tidy that no foreign notions might stray in, she was never idle.  The information she collected from these sources was both vast and varied, but she never let it flavour her opinions, which lacked sauce, and were drawn from some sort of dish into which, with all her class, she dipped her fingers.

He liked her.  No one could help liking her.  She was kind, and of such good quality, with a suggestion about her of thin, excellent, and useful china; and she was scented, too—­not with verbena, violets, or those essences which women love, but with nothing, as if she had taken stand against all meretricity.  In her intercourse with persons not “quite the thing” (she excepted the vicar from this category, though his father had dealt in haberdashery), her refinement, gently, unobtrusively, and with great practical good sense, seemed continually to murmur, “I am, and you—­well, are you, don’t you know?” But there was no self-consciousness about this attitude, for she was really not a common woman.  She simply could not help it; all her people had done this.  Their nurses breathed above them in their cradles something that, inhaled into their systems, ever afterwards prevented them from taking good, clear breaths.  And her manner!  Ah! her manner—­it concealed the inner woman so as to leave doubt of her existence!

Shelton listened to the kindly briskness with which she dwelt upon the under-gardener.

“Poor Bunyan! he lost his wife six months ago, and was quite cheerful just at first, but now he ‘s really too distressin’.  I ’ve done all I can to rouse him; it’s so melancholy to see him mopin’.  And, my dear Dick, the way he mangles the new rose-trees!  I’m afraid he’s goin’ mad; I shall have to send him away; poor fellow!”

It was clear that she sympathised with Bunyan, or, rather, believed him entitled to a modicum of wholesome grief, the loss of wives being a canonised and legal, sorrow.  But excesses!  O dear, no!

“I ’ve told him I shall raise his wages,” she sighed.  “He used to be such a splendid gardener!  That reminds me, my dear Dick; I want to have a talk with you.  Shall we go in to lunch?”

Consulting the memorandum-book in which she had been noting the case of Mrs. Hopkins, she slightly preceded Shelton to the house.