woman “heathenish.” She had casts of many of the best statuary set about her apartments--Saint Catherine’s Marriage, the Madonna, Saint Sebastian, the Judgment of Paris, a Venus or two, and a few martyrdoms. All this was like fire to stubble among the people of Langthwaite. But Madame Floriani, totally unconscious of the effect she was producing, only thought the Langthwaitians very cold in matters of art, and strangely ignorant of real merit. She was an artist herself; and sometimes when they came in their grand, stiff, expensive, and ungraceful toilettes, they found her dressed in a man’s brown holland blouse, girded with a broad leathern band: while a little blue velvet cap, with a long tassel, was stuck jauntily on the top of her graceful head, just above those curly handfuls of bright auburn hair. Whereat they were doubly shocked; and the Miss Grandvilles, very tall, bony and desiccated gladiators, said she was really very unfeminine, and that it positively was not proper. Madame Floriani’s worst enemy was Mr. Bentley. Mr. Bentley was the young incumbent of Langthwaite. He was not more than thirty as it was, and he looked like twenty. He was a tall, round, boyish person, with a round face, and round cheeks highly coloured, an innocent little snub nose, with those wide flat nostrils that make a greybeard look a youth, light-grey eyes, narrow shoulders, red hands--very red--with the fingers always swollen, as if from chronic chilblains, and a full, unformed mouth, swollen, too, like a boy’s. But in spite of this round face, with its ludicrous boyishness, Mr. Bentley had taken up the condemnatory and ascetic side. His sermons breathed more than Judaic severity; hatred of pleasure, hatred of art, hatred of liberation, hatred of everything but extreme Calvinistic tenets, church-going, and missionary meetings. This was Mr. Bentley’s profession of faith as far as he dare utter it even in Langthwaite. Yet his solemn looks and severe words were in such ludicrous contrast to that round, red, apple-face of his, which nature intended to express jollity, that more than once Madame Floriani looked up and laughed, saying, with her sweet voice and foreign accent, “But, Monsieur l’Abbé, assuredly you do not believe in yourself when you speak so!” Which words used to make Mr. Bentley furious. As he said to the Miss Grandvilles, his fast allies, it was very painful to see Madame Floriani’s unconverted state of mind. Thus the war between the pretty foreign woman and the grave young clergyman went on, and Langthwaite stood aghast.