As a rule, Mr. Verners was a tolerant person. In a squat little volume published in the year 1822 and called “A Man of the World’s Dictionary,” a Virtuous Man is defined as “a being almost imaginary. A name given to him who has the art of concealing his vices and shutting his eyes to those of others,” and so long as the vices of others did not interfere with his own, and so long as the others were of his own order, Mr. Verners was a candidate for virtue, under this definition. But the man born to be a perfect individualist is at a disadvantage when he owns an estate and feels bound by duty to marry and beget an heir: it isn’t the moderns who discovered that marriage clogs selfishness. Mr. Verners had an heir, but not, as it happened, till Dorothy had come first. If she hadn’t come first, she would not have come at all; but she came, and dazzlingly, and if there is something agreeable in being the father of a beauty, there is also something harassing. A wife, after all, is only a wife, but with a monstrous fine lady of a daughter about the house a man has to mind his p’s and q’s. Mr. Verners was a sort of a gentleman and he minded his p’s and q’s, but he wasn’t above admitting that he looked forward to the day when, Dorothy well and truly married, he could relax to reasonable carelessness at home. And not only did Dorothy not get married, not only did Whitworth procrastinate and play card games in London instead of the love-game in Lancashire, but Dorothy, instead of waiting patiently, became strangely restive. The queer thing is that her discontent began to show itself soon after she had met Reuben Hepplestall riding in the road one day now a year ago. She hadn’t mentioned the meeting at home. Why should she mention a creature who was outcast? Why give him a second thought? What possible connection could there be between the meeting and this change in her hitherto entirely submissive habit of waiting for Whitworth? None, to be sure, and no doubt Luke was perfectly right when he said it was all the vapors. “But the vapors,” said Mrs. Verners, “come from Sir Harry’s absence.” And “Tush,” said Mr. Verners, who was not without his envious sympathy of that rich bachelor in London, and there, for that time, they left it. But the vapors came again, they turned endemic while Sir Harry continued a parishioner of St. James’, a gay absentee from his estates and his plain duty of marrying Dorothy, and Mr. Verners’ sympathy wore thin. A tolerant man, but a daughter who (he held) moped and a wife who (he told her in set terms) nagged, played the deuce with his tolerance and so, finally, against his better judgment, they were come to London, “To dig the fox out of his earth,” he said. “Aye, but do you fancy the fox will relish it?” He knew how he, in the character of fox, would have received this hunt. “But we come naturally to London, for clothes for Dorothy and me,” said Mrs. Verners.