This idea of a living opened quite a delicious picture before the eye of fancy. Bella saw herself a vicar’s wife--a person of importance in the village--like Mrs. Dulcimer--inhabiting some pretty vicarage, full of old china, and modern furniture, surrounded with smiling lawns and flower-beds, instead of the gooseberry bushes, cabbage rows, and general utilitarianism and untidiness of the Scratchell garden. And with Cyril--her Cyril--for the companion of her days. Imagination could paint no fairer life. ‘I don’t say that anything has been said, my love, even to me,’ said Mrs. Dulcimer. ‘But I am long-sighted in these matters. I can see very far ahead.’ This was true, for Mrs. Dulcimer’s apprehension had often been so far in advance of fact that she had seen inclinations and nascent loves that had never existed--and had sometimes worried the victims of these fancied affections into ill-advised matrimony. Most of Mrs. Dulcimer’s happy couples began, like Benedick and Beatrice, with a little aversion. Mrs. Scratchell now appeared, smooth as to her hair and shiny as to her complexion, and with an unmistakable appearance of having just changed her gown. She saluted the Vicar’s wife with the old-fashioned curtsey which had been taught her in her boarding-school days, and seemed almost overcome when Mrs. Dulcimer shook hands with her. ‘I’m sure I don’t know how I can thank you for all your goodness to Bella,’ said the grateful mother. ‘Indeed, I want no thanks, Mrs. Scratchell. We are all very fond of Bella at the Vicarage. She is so bright and clever. What a help she must be to you!’ ‘She is indeed. I don’t know what we should do without her. She’s the only one of us that can manage her father when he’s out of temper.’ ‘What a good wife she would make for a man of limited means!’ ‘She would know how to make the most of things,’ answered Mrs. Scratchell, with a sigh; ‘but I really think I’d rather my daughters kept single all their lives than that they should have to cut and contrive as I have had. I’ve not a word to say against poor Scratchell. Poverty tries all our tempers, and his has been more tried than most men’s. He’s a good father, and a good husband, and I’ve as good children as any woman need wish to have; but, for all that, I’d rather my daughters should never marry than that they should marry like me.’ ‘Oh, Mrs. Scratchell,’ cried the Vicar’s wife, shocked at this slander against her favourite institution. ‘Surely now, as a wife and mother, you have fulfilled woman’s noblest mission. You ought to be proud of having brought up such a nice family and managed things respectably upon so little.’ ‘Perhaps I ought,’ sighed Mrs. Scratchell. ‘But I don’t feel anything, except very tired. I was forty-one last birthday, but I feel as if I were eighty.’