Both parties poured out their grievances to the same auditor, for Mr.

Touchett regarded Ermine Williams as partly clerical, and Rachel could

never be easy without her sympathy. To hear was not, however, to make

peace, while each side was so sore, so conscious of the merits of its

own case, so blind to those of the other. One deemed praise in its

highest form the prime object of his ministry; the other found the

performance indevotional, and raved that education should be sacrificed

to wretched music. But that the dissension was sad and mischievous,

it would have been very diverting; they were both so young in their

incapacity of making allowances, their certainty that theirs was the

theory to bring in the golden age, and even in their magnanimity of

forgiveness, and all the time they thought themselves so very old. "I

am resigned to disappointments; I have seen something of life."--"You

forget, Miss Williams, that my ministerial experience is not very

recent."

There was one who would have smoothed matters far better than any, who,

like Ermine, took her weapons from the armoury of good sense; but that

person was entirely unconscious how the incumbent regarded her soft

eyes, meek pensiveness, motherly sweetness, and, above all, the refined

graceful dignity that remained to her from the leading station she had

occupied. Her gracious respect towards her clergyman was a contrast as

much to the deferential coquetry of his admirers as to the abruptness of

his foe, and her indifference to parish details had even its charm in a

world of fussiness; he did not know himself how far a wish of hers would

have led him, and she was the last person to guess. She viewed him, like

all else outside her nursery, as something out of the focus of her eye;

her instinct regarded her clergyman as necessarily good and worthy, and

her ear heard Rachel railing at him; it sounded hard, but it was a pity

Rachel should be vexed and interfered with. In fact, she never thought

of the matter at all; it was only part of that outer kind of dreamy

stage-play at Avonmouth, in which she let herself he moved about at her

cousin's bidding. One part of her life had passed away from her,

and what remained to her was among her children; her interests

and intelligence seemed contracted to Conrade's horizon, and as to

everything else, she was subdued, gentle, obedient, but slow and obtuse.

Yet, little as he knew it, Mr. Touchett might have even asserted his

authority in a still more trying manner. If the gentle little widow had

not cast a halo round her relatives, he could have preached that sermon

upon the home-keeping duties of women, or have been too much offended

to accept any service from the Curtis family; and he could have done

without them, for he had a wide middle-class popularity; his manners

with the second-rate society, in which he had been bred, were just

sufficiently superior and flattering to recommend all his best

points, and he obtained plenty of subscriptions from visitors, and of

co-operation from inhabitants. Many a young lady was in a flutter at the

approach of the spruce little figure in black, and so many volunteers

were there for parish work, that districts and classes were divided and

subdivided, till it sometimes seemed as if the only difficulty was to

find poor people enough who would submit to serve as the corpus vile for

their charitable treatment.




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