“Oh, Lily,” said Bell.
“I’m sure I beg your pardon, Mr Crosbie.
It was Bernard’s fault. Bernard, I never
will come into a hayfield with you again.”
And so they all became very intimate; while Bell sat
quietly under the tree, listening to a word or two
now and then as Mr Crosbie chose to speak them.
There is a kind of enjoyment to be had in society,
in which very few words are necessary. Bell was
less vivacious than her sister Lily; and when, an
hour after this, she was dressing herself for dinner,
she acknowledged that she had passed a pleasant afternoon,
though Mr Crosbie had not said very much.
The Widow Dale of Allington
As Mrs Dale, of the Small House, was not a Dale by
birth, there can be no necessity for insisting on
the fact that none of the Dale peculiarities should
be sought for in her character. These peculiarities
were not, perhaps, very conspicuous in her daughters,
who had taken more in that respect from their mother
than from their father; but a close observer might
recognise the girls as Dales. They were constant,
perhaps obstinate, occasionally a little uncharitable
in their judgment, and prone to think that there was
a great deal in being a Dale, though not prone to
say much about it. But they had also a better
pride than this, which had come to them as their mother’s
heritage.
Mrs Dale was certainly a proud woman,—not
that there was anything appertaining to herself in
which she took a pride. In birth she had been
much lower than her husband, seeing that her grandfather
had been almost nobody. Her fortune had been
considerable for her rank in life, and on its proceeds
she now mainly depended; but it had not been sufficient
to give any of the pride of wealth. And she had
been a beauty; according to my taste, was still very
lovely; but certainly at this time of life, she, a
widow of fifteen years’ standing, with two grown-up
daughters, took no pride in her beauty. Nor had
she any conscious pride in the fact that she was a
lady. That she was a lady, inwards and outwards,
from the crown of her head to the sole of her feet,
in head, in heart, and in mind, a lady by education
and a lady by nature, a lady also by birth in spite
of that deficiency respecting her grandfather, I hereby
state as a fact—meo periculo.
And the squire, though he had no special love for her,
had recognised this, and in all respects treated her
as his equal.
But her position was one which required that she should
either be very proud or else very humble. She
was poor, and yet her daughters moved in a position
which belongs, as a rule, to the daughters of rich
men only. This they did as nieces of the childless
squire of Allington, and as his nieces she felt that
they were entitled to accept his countenance and kindness,
without loss of self-respect either to her or to them.
She would have ill done her duty as a mother to them
