Once or twice she had ventured on making a tour of inspection all round the Thorsgarth park and grounds, penetrating even to the courtyards, the kennels, and stables which lay behind the house. What she saw there did not tend to encourage her. She found that everything was conducted with a lavish profusion, a reckless extravagance, which would have been foolish in any case; and it was a lavishness which had also its stingy side, as such lavishness usually has. While necessary repairs were left neglected for months, or undone altogether, many pounds would be spent on some new contrivance for warming or ventilating a stable, already luxuriously fitted up. While some of the men on the farm complained that their carts were falling to pieces, silver-mounted harness was accumulating in the harness-room, for no earthly purpose except to make a show behind the glass doors. Many another extravagant and senseless fancy or whim was indulged to the full, while ordinary necessaries were stinted. It seemed to Eleanor that the establishment swarmed with servants, both men and maids. Their functions and offices were a mystery to her. They always seemed exceedingly busy when she appeared upon the scene, but she had an uneasy consciousness that it was only in seeming, and that as soon as her back was turned, a very different state of things again prevailed. She had been accustomed to a liberal, and even splendid establishment, but one conducted on principles of enlightened economy—without a superfluous retainer, but at the same time without a fault or a failure, from one year’s end to the other. The contrast which she saw here offended her sense of decency and order. She knew that Otho ought to retrench, and she would gladly have helped him to do so, with the joy usually brought to bear by women, unskilled in active financial matters, upon this negative process of saving by means of renouncing things.