The idea of love upon the lips of ordinary men, provoked Dahlia’s irony; and the youths of Wrexby and Fenhurst had no chance against her secret Prince Florizels.  Them she endowed with no pastoral qualities; on the contrary, she conceived that such pure young gentlemen were only to be seen, and perhaps met, in the great and mystic City of London.  Naturally, the girls dreamed of London.  To educate themselves, they copied out whole pages of a book called the `Field of Mars,’ which was next to the family Bible in size among the volumes of the farmer’s small library.  The deeds of the heroes of this book, and the talk of the fairy princes, were assimilated in their minds; and as they looked around them upon millers’, farmers’, maltsters’, and tradesmen’s sons, the thought of what manner of youth would propose to marry them became a precocious tribulation.  Rhoda, at the age of fifteen, was distracted by it, owing to her sister’s habit of masking her own dismal internal forebodings on the subject, under the guise of a settled anxiety concerning her sad chance.

In dress, the wife of the rector of Wrexby was their model.  There came once to Squire Blancove’s unoccupied pew a dazzling vision of a fair lady.  They heard that she was a cousin of his third wife, and a widow, Mrs. Lovell by name.  They looked at her all through the service, and the lady certainly looked at them in return; nor could they, with any distinctness, imagine why, but the look dwelt long in their hearts, and often afterward, when Dahlia, upon taking her seat in church, shut her eyes, according to custom, she strove to conjure up the image of herself, as she had appeared to the beautiful woman in the dress of grey-shot silk, with violet mantle and green bonnet, rose-trimmed; and the picture she conceived was the one she knew herself by, for many ensuing years.

Mrs. Fleming fought her battle with a heart worthy of her countrywomen, and with as much success as the burden of a despondent husband would allow to her.  William John Fleming was simply a poor farmer, for whom the wheels of the world went too fast:—­a big man, appearing to be difficult to kill, though deeply smitten.  His cheeks bloomed in spite of lines and stains, and his large, quietly dilated, brown ox-eyes, that never gave out a meaning, seldom showed as if they had taken one from what they saw.  Until his wife was lost to him, he believed that he had a mighty grievance against her; but as he was not wordy, and was by nature kind, it was her comfort to die and not to know it.  This grievance was rooted in the idea that she was ruinously extravagant.  The sight of the plentiful table was sore to him; the hungry mouths, though he grudged to his offspring nothing that he could pay for, were an afflicting prospect.  “Plump ’em up, and make ’em dainty,” he advanced in contravention of his wife’s talk of bread and beef.