She was the daughter of a small publican in one of the southern counties, Miss Burton said, and married Mr. Gurrage, then a commercial traveller in carpets. (How does one travel in carpets?) Anyway, whatever that is, he rose and became a partner, and finally amassed a huge fortune, and when they were both quite old they got “Augustus.”  He was “a puny, delicate boy,” to quote Miss Burton again, and was not sent to school—­only to Cambridge later on.  Perhaps that is what gives him that look of his things fitting wrong, and his skin being puffy and flabby, as if he had never been knocked about by other boys.  My friend of the knife, even with his coating of mud, looked quite different.

Oh!  I wonder if I shall ever know any people of one’s own sort that one has not to be polite to against the grain because one happens to be one’s self a lady.  Perhaps there are numbers of nice people in this neighborhood, but they naturally don’t trouble about us in our tiny cottage, and so we see practically nobody.

Just as Miss Burton was leaving Mr. Gurrage rode up.  He tried to open the gate with the end of his whip, but he could not, and would have had to dismount only Miss Burton rushed forward to open it for him.  Then he got down and held the bridle over his arm and walked up the little path.

“Send some one to hold my horse,” he said to Hephzibah, who answered his ring at the door.  I could hear, as the window was a little open and he has a loud voice.

“There is no one to send, sir,” said Hephzibah, who, I am sure, felt annoyed.  Two laborers happened to be passing in the road, and he got one of them to hold his horse, and so came in at last.  He is unattractive when you see him in a room; he seemed blustering and yet ill at ease.  But he did not thank us for keeping the suite clean!  He was awfully friendly, and asked us to make use of his garden, and, in fact, anything we wanted.  I hardly spoke at all.

“You have made a snug little crib of it,” he said, in such a patronizing voice—­how I dislike sentences like that; I don’t know whether or no they are slang (grandmamma says I use slang myself sometimes!), but “a snug little crib” does not please me.  He took off his glove when I gave him some tea, and he has thick, common hands, and he fidgeted and bounced up if I moved to take grandmamma her cup, and said each time, “Allow me,” and that is another sentence I do not like.  In fact, I think he is a horrid young man, and I wish he was not our landlord.  He actually squeezed my hand when he said good-bye.  I had no intention of doing more than to make a bow, but he thrust his hand out so that I could not help it.

“You’ll find your way up to Ledstone, anyway, won’t you?” he said, with a sort of affectionate look.

Grandmamma found him insupportable, she told me when he was gone.  She even preferred the mother.