Lady Aylmer was more fortunate.  She had occupations of which her husband knew nothing, and for which he was altogether unfit.  Though she could not succeed in making retrenchments, the could and did succeed in keeping the household books.  Sir Anthony could only blow up the servants when they were thoughtless enough to come in his way, and in doing that was restricted by his wife’s presence.  But Lady Aylmer could get at them day and night.  She had no gout to impede her progress about the house and grounds, and could make her way to places which the master never saw; and then she wrote many letters daily, whereas Sir Anthony hardly ever took a pen in his hand.  And she knew the cottages of all the poor about the place, and knew also all their sins of omission and commission.  She was driven out, too, every day, summer and winter, wet and dry, and consumed enormous packets of wool and worsted, which were sent to her monthly from York.  And she had a companion in her daughter, whereas Sir Anthony had no companion.  Wherever Lady Aylmer went, Miss Aylmer went with her, and relieved what might otherwise have been the tedium of her life.  She had been a beauty on a large scale, and was still aware that she had much in her personal appearance which justified pride.  She carried herself uprightly, with a commanding nose and broad forehead; and though the graces of her own hair had given way to a front, there was something even in the front which added to her dignity, if it did not make her a handsome woman.

Miss Aylmer, who was the eldest of the younger generation, and who was now gently descending from her fortieth year, lacked the strength of her mother’s character, but admired her mother’s ways, and followed Lady Aylmer in all things at a distance.  She was very good as indeed was Lady Aylmer entertaining a high idea of duty, and aware that her own life admitted of but little self- indulgence.  She had no pleasures, she incurred no expenses ; and was quite alive to the fact that as Aylmer Park required a regiment of lazy, gormandizing servants to maintain its position in the county, the Aylmers themselves should not be lazy, and should not gormandize.  No one was more careful with her few shillings than Miss Aylmer.  She had, indeed, abandoned a life’s correspondence with an old friend because she would not pay the postage on letters to Italy.  She knew that it was for the honour of the family that one of her brothers should sit in Parliament, and was quite willing to deny herself a new dress because sacrifices must be made to lessen electioneering expenses.  She knew that it was her lot to be driven about slowly in a carriage with a livery servant before her and another behind her, and then eat a dinner which the cook-maid would despise.  She was aware that it was her duty to be snubbed by her mother, and to encounter her father’s ill-temper, and to submit to her brother’s indifference, and to have, so to say, the slightest possible modicum of personal individuality.