Living such a life in such surroundings, and feeling Kestercham to be his one world, and the world of all whom he knew, Gerald Eversley would, perhaps, have called his life dull if he had realised the possibility of any other life. But his glimpses of the outer world were few and far between. He had no companions of his own age; for there was not a gentleman’s family in Kestercham, and the few young children in the farmhouses were such that Mrs. Eversley, who prided herself (so far as she would admit the possibility of pride) upon the uncontaminated gentility of her birth, would not hear of his associating with them, except upon terms of distance and superiority. She was sorely afraid of his losing his ‘gentlemanlike’ manners and sinking to the level of ‘common people.’ For Mrs. Eversley was haunted by a singular dread of any person or any thing that could be called ‘common.’ Whether she imagined herself to be the model of distinction it is difficult to say; but she certainly thought she was the antithesis of what was ‘common.’ The scriptural direction to ‘call nothing common or unclean’ was not interpreted by Mrs. Eversley as having any relation to her own view of her neighbours. Mr. Eversley, in one of his rare humorous sallies, told her once that he could not help doubting if, in her heart, she really approved the Book of Common Prayer. Mrs. Eversley possessed a wonderful scent for the faintest suspicion of ‘commonness’ in friend or foe. To dissenters she was radically hostile, not only because they were ‘aliens from the commonwealth of Israel,’ or because a godly dissenting minister resident in one of the neighbouring parishes had the impudence (as she regarded it) to institute open-air services in the summer months on Kestercham Green, but chiefly because they were so ‘common.’ It was a ground of self-complacency in her mind, nor did she feel it to be in any sense unchristian, that at a meeting in behalf of the British and Foreign Bible Society she had refused to shake hands with a dissenting minister. He was a worthy little man--Mrs. Eversley did not deny that--he had laboured for a great many years in a quiet way on a miserable pittance among the scattered members of his flock in Kestercham and some half-dozen villages lying around, but nevertheless, in Mrs. Eversley’s eyes, he was a spiritual poacher, against whom she would, if she could, have invoked the protection and the penal severity of a whole code of spiritual game-laws; and, above all, he was so ‘common.’ So the unhappy minister was doomed to forego the privilege of grasping Mrs. Eversley’s hand. It was not known that he ever spoke of this denial, but probably he felt it, and it did not make him love the Church.