He was also strong on the subject of sex; holding the doctrine of the rougher rights of men, and the gentler privileges of ladies; and, while denying anything like elemental equality, conceding, as has been said, all kinds of social superiority. His favourite simile, which was evidently not original, was that men were as the oak, born to brave the battle and the breeze; women, the clinging ivy. This doctrine applied only to ladies; to women in the rough, women of the people, servants, peasants, and the like, he was simply what only one word can express-brutal.

An old servant who had lived with him in his bachelor days, once heard him bring out this favourite flourish of his about the oak and the ivy.

"Ah, oak and ivy 's all very well when you've got friends at your back to look after you," she said, setting her lips tight; “but what I say is, it's the toad and the harrow when you haven't; and it ain't pleasant for the toad.

Mrs. Hamley approved her husband's doctrines, if sometimes his manner of setting them forth made her feel that to be even mistress of Abbey Holme had its drawbacks. For her own part she advocated domestic discipline, as well as upheld theoretical feminine submission. Her central creed was the plasticity of human nature when taken young and firmly handled; and absolute obedience to social ordinances stood in her mind next in importance to obedience to the Ten Commandments. She had no tolerance for the wild humours, the erratic notions, the wayward fancies of youth. She liked all things to be in order; and minds and hearts with the rest. There was one settled and unalterable way of right, to her thinking, and every divergence therefrom was distinctly wrong. The doctrine of venial faults revolted her; and she refused to admit the plea of extenuating circumstances, whatever the provocation. She was one of those women who can look neither before nor after, and for whom their own country, day, style of living, and manner of thought, their own views, ways, habits, friends, and associations are all focussed exactly right, and are impossible to be bettered. She had an odd irrational kind of opposition to people and things that were different from herself; as if she had been born absolute in taste and judgment, and what she did not like was therefore deserving of condemnation. Thus, she could not tolerate foreigners nor dissenters nor free-thinkers in any sense; and she disliked even friends and backers who went a hair's breadth beyond herself. If they did, steeped in opposition as she was, she used to turn round and demolish her former theory, leaving them dismayed and discomfited. She wanted only the exact echo of her opinions, the most nicely graduated reproduction; and those who gave more gave too much. She had a good intellect of its kind; but she was too positive in her assertions, and too inaccurate in her facts, 2 H

VOL. XL.

to be a pleasant conversationalist. She was unable to reason to a point, and always got angry over an argument. Her religious views were sharply defined and entirely unelastic, and she was equally hostile to doubt as to enthusiasm. No inconvenient spiritualism for her; still less the anguish of struggling souls seeking for a better way and a truer light. The world has all it wants, she used to say; and modern English society is the final outcome of the Best.

She was by temperament grave, by temper fretful; seldom laughed, often chided; she could do generous things on a large scale, but she was mean in small matters, and though not unkind, must be supreme. For though she talked of feminine submission as much as Mr. Hamley talked of masculine authority, and inculcated it on others, somehow she seemed to exempt herself from the rank of womanly slaves, and was always the mistress, absolute and autocratic.

This was quite well understood at Abbey Holme; and Mr. Hamley, though he might stick his thumbs into his armholes and play tunes on his chest, never in her presence commanded man nor maid, uttered a decided opinion of his own, nor differed from hers, nor indeed held his own flag aloft in any way. She was always referred to humbly as "Lady," and he followed in her wake deferentially.

In some things indeed she honestly possessed him. She had had a better education than he, and made no difficulties on the score of conjugal delicacy in showing him where he tripped and how he had exposed his ignorance. And when a woman has sufficient strength of mind to do this very often, and always quietly, she is sure to end by subjugating her husband, whatever his number of inches; and, perhaps, the bigger the man the more thorough his subjugation. Then she was invariably self-possessed, and always in the attitude of a superior being. She allowed no enthusiasm, no loud laughter, no noise, no fun, no rudeness in her presence. Life with her must be welloiled in all its hinges, and regulated by the strictest rules of commonsense. She went regularly to church twice on Sundays; not because she felt the need or the comfort of going to church, but because it was the right thing to do as an example to the common people, and what was owing to the rector as a gentleman whose function it was to read the service and preach for five-and-twenty minutes after. And she had morning and evening prayers at home; the latter punctually at ten; because it was respectable and might do the servants good, and certainly enabled her to see that they were all safe under the roof and sober. But when she said in those prayers, which she herself read, that she was a worm and a miserable sinner, she said the words with no more inward conviction than if she had confessed she was an elephant or a giraffe. They were words with her, no more; and she did not feel a wish to make them more.

Between these two, Dora Drummond, Mr. Hamley's young cousin,

had had but a compressed kind of existence during the ten years of her adoption. Masculine supremacy on the one hand, and feminine discipline on the other, had taken all the courage out of a nature never brave nor strong, and more prone to yield than to withstand. Her sole object was to avoid contention and secure peace; and as she found submission easier than fighting for freedom, she slipped under the yoke with perfect grace and obedience, and gave no more trouble to the authorities at Abbey Holme than Patricia had given at Barsands. But the difference of method by which these two girls had been taught obedience was not inconsiderable. Neither were the results.

This then was the kind of place into which Patricia came from the freedom, the happiness, the practical democracy of Barsands. Not a line of the old ruling remained to her. Even the sea, her old friend and playmate, was not the sea of her love. Tamed down to a mere mill-pond, it seemed to have lost all the life and meaning it had when it came lashing round the cliffs and foaming over the Gridiron out on that wild Cornish coast. And even such as it was she could not see it. Her windows at Abbey Holme looked only on a steep bank of trimmed and patterned flower-beds surmounted by the wall which hid the offices. Now, in the late autumn time, when there were no flowers to fill them, the beds were ribboned with coloured stones; which Patricia admired about as much as she admired earrings, rouge, or face-powder.

If the place was inharmonious, the life at Abbey Holme was even more so. Into that sternly-fashioned method of existence, so still and so subdued, her breezy vigour came with a kind of tempestuous force that frightened Dora, horrified Aunt Hamley, and disgusted Aunt Hamley's husband. Voice, step, manner, gesture, everything carried with it the impression of a whirlwind to these quiet, well-regulated people; and Mrs. Hamley often said, with her lips drawn close, that she looked after her when she left the room, expecting to see her leave sticks and straws behind her. She was so noisy! so unsubdued! lamented the poor lady who would have been glad to have loved her dead brother's child if she could have brought her down to the proper point of domestic discipline. She seemed as if she should have been a boy, not a girl, she was so distressingly strong and healthy, so large altogether! And how obtuse! It was impossible to make her understand anything unless it was put into the plainest language; and as for a hint, you might as well expect a blind man to see you beckon to him as Patricia to receive a hint. How different from dear Dora's marvellous delicacy of perception, and that tact which was almost like another sense!

Mrs. Hamley had some reason for this last lamentation, for Patricia was indeed impervious to all the lessons conveyed by the way of dignified carriage and silent reproof. When Aunt Hamley answered

her loud and frankly-worded questions in a voice so low and level that the girl's quick senses could hardly catch the words-answered her vaguely, without looking at her, never if possible giving her the information she asked, saying, “I do not know," when the thing was part of her very existence, and speaking with a deep sigh and an oppressive politeness-Patricia used to think that perhaps poor Aunt had a headache; poor Aunt often seemed to have headaches; and she used to look at her so compassionately that Mrs. Hamley sometimes rebuked her for her pertinacity, and told her sharply that it was illbred to stare.

When the girl wished to surround her with those little attentions which some girls like to show their elders, and which certain women hate to receive unasked-when she carried sacred pillows as if they had been kittens by the middle under her arm-sacred pillows from sacred sofas, which dear Dora would not have deranged for worlds— and wanted to stuff them into Aunt's easy chair where they did not fit, and only threw her too far forward and made her uncomfortable; when she plunged about for footstools, and denuded corners of their rightful ornaments, and made a commotion for kindness, when all that Mrs. Hamley asked was peace and quietness; the poor, starched, self-centred lady thought she should have gone distracted. She could not bear it; nor did she attempt to conceal that her niece's zeal without discretion made her headache worse than ever.

She used to call dear Dora to undo in her quiet, gliding, soothing way what Patricia had done with such enthusiastic goodwill and tumultuous philanthropy. And then Patricia used to feel snubbed in spite of her determination to see only the best side of everything, and to be satisfied with her fate whatever it was. She used to wonder vaguely what it all meant, and how it was she so evidently failed to please when she tried so hard. After which she would redouble her efforts by the very fact of her failure; continuing in the vicious circle that never knew a break for better things. If her aunt had only spoken to her straightly and kindly, the whole thing would have been put right. But she wanted her to divine what she would not explain; and then was annoyed at her denseness of perception.

Perhaps the person most to be pitied at this time was Dora. She knew exactly where the hitch was, but she had not sufficient generosity or truth either to warn Patricia or to defend her. She was of the order of false prophets who prophesy smooth things, and cry peace when there is no peace. She was of those who are all things to all men, and always adopted the colours of her company. She played echo in private to Mrs. Hamley's complainings and agreed with her that Patricia was a dreadful infliction, and the most badly brought-up young person of her degree to be found within the four seas. But she was careful not to go a line beyond her pattern; else, if she had,

Mrs. Hamley would have been down on her for injustice, and would have taken Patricia's part with vigour if acridity.

To Patricia, when alone, she was sweet and flattering as if to atone for the burden of snubbing she had to bear; but in public, before the Hamleys, she was quite well-bred but not even familiar, still less affectionate; which sometimes amazed Patricia, and seemed to make her whole life a thaumatrope where things jumped about and changed places, she could not tell how or why. For the matter of that however, she had fallen in love, girl-like, with Mr. Hamley's pretty, graceful, well-mannered young cousin; and love with Patricia meant the patience as well as the steadfastness of loyalty.

Meanwhile, Mr. Hamley looked on and chuckled. It was a triumph to him, and he enjoyed it. That the blood-cousin of Ledbury's officeboy should be such an undoubted success, and the grand-daughter of Admiral Sir Robert Kemball, K.C.B., such an undeniable failure, tickled him between the ribs of his vanity deliciously. He took no open part in the small feminine warfare going on in the drawingroom, further than by almost ignoring Patricia altogether; for which he received more than one sharp rebuke from Mrs. Hamley in private, and a cold demand whether he did not think her niece deserved a little more courtesy at his hands? But he knew too well the shaky character of the ground he had to traverse daily to act on the spirit of this rebuke. If he had befriended Patricia in the smallest degree, he would have been called to order on the charge of affording comfort and support to a rebel; and, of the two, he thought the attitude of nonintervention the safer.