’It isn’t that not that at all.  It would not be foolish, not in your sense of the word, but it would be wrong.  My aunt has been kind to me, and therefore I am bound to her for this service.  But she is kind to you also, and yet you are not bound.  That’s why I complain.  You sail always under false pretences, and yet you think you do your duty.  You have to see your lawyer which means going to your club; or to attend to your tenants which means hunting and shooting.’

‘I haven’t got any tenants.’

’You know very well that you could remain over Sunday without doing any harm to anybody only you don’t like going to church three times, and you don’t like hearing my aunt read a sermon afterwards.  Why shouldn’t you stay, and I go to the club?’

‘With all my heart, if you can manage it.’

’But I can’t; we ain’t allowed to have clubs, or shooting, or to have our own way in anything, putting forward little pretences about lawyers.’

‘Come, I’ll stay if you’ll ask me.’

’I’m sure I won’t do that.  In the first place you’d go to sleep, and then she would be offended; and I don’t know that your sufferings would make mine any lighter.  I’m not prepared to alter the ways of the world, but feel myself entitled to grumble at them sometimes.’

Mrs Winterfield inhabited a large brick house in the centre of the town.  It had a long frontage to the street; for there was not only the house itself, with its three square windows on each side of the door, and its seven windows over that, and again its seven windows in the upper story but the end of the coach-house also abutted on the street, on which was the family clock, quite as much respected in Perivale as was the town-clock; and between the coach-house and the mansion there was the broad entrance into the yard, and the entrance also to the back door.  No Perivalian ever presumed to doubt that Mrs Winterfield’s house was the most important house in the town.  Nor did any stranger doubt it on looking at the frontage.  But then it was in all respects a town house to the eye that is, an English town house, being as ugly and as respectable as unlimited bricks and mortar could make it.  Immediately opposite to Mrs Winterfield lived the leading doctor and a retired builder, so that the lady’s eye was not hurt by any sign of a shop.  The shops, indeed, came within a very few yards of her on either side; but as the neighbouring shops on each side were her own property, this was not unbearable.  To me, had I lived there, the incipient growth of grass through some of the stones which formed the margin of the road would have been altogether unendurable.  There is no sign of coming decay which is so melancholy to the eye as any which tells of a decrease in the throng of men.  Of men or horses there was never any throng now in that end of Perivale.  That street had formed part of the main line of road from Salisbury to Taunton, and coaches, wagons, and posting-carriages had been frequent