‘Thank you, Miss Dixon is very well.’ (Eleanor repressed a smile on hearing Ada’s mother speak of her thus.) ‘She is not at home just at present. She’s staying with some friends in Yorkshire—in the Dales—some relations of Mr. Dixon’s.’ ‘Oh yes. In which of the Dales?’ ‘Wensleydale. My husband’s cousin has a place there’ (a large farm would have been the correct description), ‘near Bedale, it is.’ ‘Oh, I hope she is enjoying herself.’ ‘Oh, very much, thank you. She’s very much sought after—sixpence you will want, I think—and they visit a good deal amongst the neighbours.’ ‘Yes? And Mr. Camm? I hope you have good accounts of him?’ ‘I really haven’t heard anything about him lately,’ said Mrs. Dixon, in an indescribable tone, as she poised the fingers of both hands on the counter and looked out of the window, as if she thought the interview had better come to an end. ‘Ah, I suppose Ada will be the person to get news of him. I was so glad to hear he had done so well, and got such an excellent situation at Leeds. Ada will like to live near a large town like that, I should think.’ ‘Well, yes—perhaps. Perhaps not,’ said Mrs. Dixon, with a glacial reserve, and then with crushing mysteriousness—‘There’s no saying where Ada may end, or what she’s born to. She is not a common girl, by any means.’ ‘I hope she will end in marrying Mr. Camm, and making him a very good wife. He is a first-rate young man, and deserves to be made happy,’ said Eleanor, nettled by the supercilious tone in which Roger’s future mother-in-law spoke of him. ‘Oh, he’s a very worthy young man, I don’t doubt,’ came the rejoinder; ‘a little rough, and wanting in polish—hardly the genteel manners one could desire.’ ‘No, not very genteel, certainly,’ said Eleanor, hurrying a little in her desire to be able to laugh at leisure over the complaint that Roger Camm’s manners were not ‘genteel.’ Indeed, they were not. If gentility were the desideratum, they were deplorably wanting, and likely to remain so. Going up the street she suddenly met Michael Langstroth, and could not help telling him the joke, her eyes dancing as she spoke. ‘Mr. Langstroth, do you know that for years you have cherished as your brother a person—I can call him nothing else—whose manners are not genteel. At least, Mrs. Dixon says they are not,—not as genteel as she could wish in her son-in-law—and she ought to know.’ Michael looked at her searchingly for a perceptible time, before he replied— ‘At last you have heard something that has made you laugh,’ said he. ‘I am delighted, and Roger may congratulate himself on his want of gentility, if it leads even indirectly to that good result.’ ‘Why—how—what do you know about my laughing?’ she asked, crimsoning. ‘Nothing, except that you don’t do it often enough. I wish I could give you a prescription, but there is none for the ailment that is want of mirth; none in all the pharmacopeia.’