The Woodlanders

"'Tis a pity--a thousand pities!" her father kept saying next morning

at breakfast, Grace being still in her bedroom.

But how could he, with any self-respect, obstruct Winterborne's suit at

this stage, and nullify a scheme he had labored to promote--was,

indeed, mechanically promoting at this moment? A crisis was

approaching, mainly as a result of his contrivances, and it would have

to be met.

But here was the fact, which could not be disguised: since seeing what

an immense change her last twelve months of absence had produced in his

daughter, after the heavy sum per annum that he had been spending for

several years upon her education, he was reluctant to let her marry

Giles Winterborne, indefinitely occupied as woodsman, cider-merchant,

apple-farmer, and what not, even were she willing to marry him herself.

"She will be his wife if you don't upset her notion that she's bound to

accept him as an understood thing," said Mrs. Melbury. "Bless ye,

she'll soon shake down here in Hintock, and be content with Giles's way

of living, which he'll improve with what money she'll have from you.

'Tis the strangeness after her genteel life that makes her feel

uncomfortable at first. Why, when I saw Hintock the first time I

thought I never could like it. But things gradually get familiar, and

stone floors seem not so very cold and hard, and the hooting of the

owls not so very dreadful, and loneliness not so very lonely, after a

while."

"Yes, I believe ye. That's just it. I KNOW Grace will gradually sink

down to our level again, and catch our manners and way of speaking, and

feel a drowsy content in being Giles's wife. But I can't bear the

thought of dragging down to that old level as promising a piece of

maidenhood as ever lived--fit to ornament a palace wi'--that I've taken

so much trouble to lift up. Fancy her white hands getting redder every

day, and her tongue losing its pretty up-country curl in talking, and

her bounding walk becoming the regular Hintock shail and wamble!"

"She may shail, but she'll never wamble," replied his wife, decisively.

When Grace came down-stairs he complained of her lying in bed so late;

not so much moved by a particular objection to that form of indulgence

as discomposed by these other reflections.

The corners of her pretty mouth dropped a little down. "You used to

complain with justice when I was a girl," she said. "But I am a woman

now, and can judge for myself....But it is not that; it is something

else!" Instead of sitting down she went outside the door.