The flower-beds were overgrown by weeds, and by a few garden flowers run wild which had lost both size and sweetness, as flowers so often do when left to nature. An oblong hall, of considerable dimensions, from which the doors of the sittingrooms opened, and which was hung with guns and fishing-rods, and with a large stag’s head adorned by enormous antlers opposite the door, made an imposing entrance to the house; but the carpets were all worn, the curtains dingy, the furniture gloomy and old; huge mahogany sideboards, and big tables, vast square-shouldered chairs; things heavy and costly and ugly fitted the rooms; nothing for beauty, or even comfort. It seemed hard indeed to know for what such furniture was made, save for endurance, to wear as long as possible. Young Mrs. Joscelyn when she came home had hung her antimacassars over the chairs, she had put out her “Keepsake” and “Friendship’s Offering” upon the table, and placed her guitar in the most favourable position; and then she sat down to be happy. Poor gentle young woman! She had been the pet at home, the only daughter. She had been considered the most accomplished of girls. Whatever she said had secured the smiles and admiration of father and mother; all that she did had been pretty, had been sweet, not from any quality of its own, but because it was Liddy who did it. To describe the extraordinary sensation with which she woke up a few months after her marriage, perhaps not so much, to discover that Liddy having done it, made nothing attractive or charming, would be impossible. It took away from her all her little confidence in herself, all her faith in those around her. Very soon--so soon that it seemed immediately, the next day--her husband made it very clearly visible that Liddy was the synonym not for everything that was pleasant, but for all the awkwardness, the foolishness, the inappropriate words and inconvenient actions of the house. “It is just like you,” he began to say to her, long before the first summer was over. For a time she tried to think it was “Ralph’s way,” but that did not stand her long in stead. And with her opinion of herself, her confidence in everything else gradually deserted her. She recognised that the Joscelyns’ blue blood did very little for them, that old Uncle Harry was often less polite than Isaac Oliver who was his hind, and more dreadful still, an admission she never would make to herself, that the very curates whom she had despised were beside her patrician Ralph like beings of another world.