It was Mrs. Nevill Tyson’s genius for this sort of remark that helped to make her reputation later on.

CHAPTER II

MRS. NEVILL TYSON

Tyson took his wife abroad for six months to finish her education (as if to be Tyson’s wife was not education enough for any woman!); and Drayton Parva forgot about them for a time.

In fact, nobody had fully realized the existence of Molly Wilcox till she burst on them as Mrs. Nevill Tyson.

It was the first appearance of the bride and bridegroom on their return from their long honeymoon.  The rector was giving an “At Home” (tentatively) in their honor; and a great many people had accepted, feeling that a very interesting social experiment was about to be made.  Everybody remembers how Mrs. Nevill Tyson fluttered down into that party of thirty women to eleven men, in an absurd frock, and with a still more absurd air of assured welcome.  Poor little woman!  Her comings and goings from one Continental watering-place to another had been the progress of a triumphant divinity; where she found an hotel she left a temple.  I sometimes think, too, that little look of expectant gladness may have been due to the feeling that the Rectory was in England, and England was home.  She was dressed in the most perfect Parisian fashion, from the crown of her fur toque to the tips of her little shoes; but she had never learned to speak three words of French correctly.  She informed everybody of the fact that afternoon, laughing with the keenest enjoyment of her remarkable stupidity; it seemed that her role was to be remarkable in everything.  However that may have been, in less than half an hour seven out of those eleven men were gathered round her chair in the corner; two out of the seven were the rector and Sir Peter Morley, and Mrs. Nevill Tyson was talking to all of them at once.

Mrs. Nevill Tyson—­she was an illusion and a distraction from head to foot; her beauty made a promise to the senses and broke it to the intellect.  Coil upon coil, and curl upon curl of dark hair, the dark eyes of some ruminant animal, a little frivolous curve in an intelligent nose, a lower jaw like a boy’s, the full white throat of a woman, and the mouth and cheeks of a child just waked from sleep.  Tyson had escaped one misfortune that had been prophesied for him.  His wife was not vulgar.  She sat at her ease (much more at her ease than Miss Batchelor), and chattered away about her honeymoon, her bad French, the places she had been to, the people she had seen, and all without any consciousness of her delightful self.  Now it was a continuous stream of minute talk, growing shallower and shallower as it spread over a larger surface; and now her mind had hardly settled on its subject before it was off and away again like a butterfly.  There was one advantage in this excessive lightness of touch, that it left great things as it found them, for great things lay