Not that she had veneration for titles.  She considered them a tinsel, and the devotee on his knee-caps to them a lump for a kick.  Adding:  ’Of course I stand for my class; and if we can’t have a manlier people—­ and it ’s not likely in a country treating my brother so badly—­well, then, let things go on as they are.’  But it was the pretension to a part in the name of Ormont which so violently offended the democratic aristocrat, and caused her to resent it as an assault on the family honour, by ’a woman springing up out of nothing’—­a woman of no distinctive birth.

She was rational in her fashion; or Weyburn could at least see where and how the reason in her took a twist.  The Rev. Mr. Hampton-Evey would not see it; he was, in charity to her ladyship, of a totally contrary opinion, he informed Weyburn.  The laborious pastor and much-enduring Churchman met my lady’s apologist as he was having a swing of the legs down the lanes before breakfast, and he fell upon a series of complaints, which were introduced by a declaration that ‘he much feared’ her ladyship would have a heavy legal bill to pay for taking the law into her hands up at Addicotes.

Her ladyship might, if she pleased, he said, encourage her domestics and her husband’s tenants and farm-labourers to abandon the church for the chapel, and go, as she had done and threatened to do habitually, to the chapel herself; but to denounce the ritual of the Orthodox Church under the denomination of ‘barbarous,’ to say of the invoking supplications of the service, that they were—­she had been heard to state it more or less publicly and repeatedly—­suitable to abject ministers and throngs at the court of an Indian rajah, that he did not hesitate to term highly unbecoming in a lady of her station, subversive and unchristian.  The personal burdens inflicted on him by her ladyship he prayed for patience to endure.  He surprised Weyburn in speaking of Lady Charlotte as ‘educated and accomplished.’  She was rather more so than Weyburn knew, and more so than was common among the great ladies of her time.

Weyburn strongly advised the reverend gentleman on having it out with Lady Charlotte in a personal interview.  He sketched the great lady’s combative character on a foundation of benevolence, and stressed her tolerance for open dealing, and the advantage gained by personal dealings with her—­after a mauling or two.  His language and his illustrations touched an old-school chord in the Rev. Mr. Hampton-Evey, who hummed over the project, profoundly disrelishing the introductory portion.

’Do me the honour to call and see me to-morrow, after breakfast, before her ladyship starts for the fray on Addicote heights,’ Weyburn said; ’and I will ask your permission to stand by you.  Her bark is terrific, we know; and she can bite, but there’s no venom.’

Finally, on a heave of his chest, Mr. Hampton-Evey consented to call, in the interests of peace.