Both parties poured out their grievances to the same auditor, for Mr. Touchett regarded Ermine Williams as partly clerical, and Rachel could never be easy without her sympathy.  To hear was not, however, to make peace, while each side was so sore, so conscious of the merits of its own case, so blind to those of the other.  One deemed praise in its highest form the prime object of his ministry; the other found the performance indevotional, and raved that education should be sacrificed to wretched music.  But that the dissension was sad and mischievous, it would have been very diverting; they were both so young in their incapacity of making allowances, their certainty that theirs was the theory to bring in the golden age, and even in their magnanimity of forgiveness, and all the time they thought themselves so very old.  “I am resigned to disappointments; I have seen something of life.”—­“You forget, Miss Williams, that my ministerial experience is not very recent.”

There was one who would have smoothed matters far better than any, who, like Ermine, took her weapons from the armoury of good sense; but that person was entirely unconscious how the incumbent regarded her soft eyes, meek pensiveness, motherly sweetness, and, above all, the refined graceful dignity that remained to her from the leading station she had occupied.  Her gracious respect towards her clergyman was a contrast as much to the deferential coquetry of his admirers as to the abruptness of his foe, and her indifference to parish details had even its charm in a world of fussiness; he did not know himself how far a wish of hers would have led him, and she was the last person to guess.  She viewed him, like all else outside her nursery, as something out of the focus of her eye; her instinct regarded her clergyman as necessarily good and worthy, and her ear heard Rachel railing at him; it sounded hard, but it was a pity Rachel should be vexed and interfered with.  In fact, she never thought of the matter at all; it was only part of that outer kind of dreamy stage-play at Avonmouth, in which she let herself he moved about at her cousin’s bidding.  One part of her life had passed away from her, and what remained to her was among her children; her interests and intelligence seemed contracted to Conrade’s horizon, and as to everything else, she was subdued, gentle, obedient, but slow and obtuse.

Yet, little as he knew it, Mr. Touchett might have even asserted his authority in a still more trying manner.  If the gentle little widow had not cast a halo round her relatives, he could have preached that sermon upon the home-keeping duties of women, or have been too much offended to accept any service from the Curtis family; and he could have done without them, for he had a wide middle-class popularity; his manners with the second-rate society, in which he had been bred, were just sufficiently superior and flattering to recommend all his best points, and he obtained