‘It is so little a stranger knows. I think there is no idyllic life. We are very prosaic and poor, and our troubles are so very real--vulgar, you might call them. We look up, on the other hand, to what we call your brilliant and gay life, and think, surely there are no troubles there. Thus it is true, you see, the one half of the world never understands the other.’ ‘But you,’ said Leo, ‘know both.’ ‘Do I? I had a little share of the other, very short, and not, perhaps, very satisfactory. I never found it very brilliant or gay. The village life I know by heart, and its troubles, which are bad enough; small little vices and weakness, dreadfully poor and commonplace: you can’t understand how pitiful they are.’ ‘Can’t I? Well, so far as it is of any use, you must teach me. For you know from henceforth I am English, and will do my duty. My duty, perhaps, does not demand an endless seclusion here.’ ‘Seclusion do you call it? You will have half the people in London pouring down soon, when your mother feels she has got established, and is ready to receive them.’ ‘Very likely,’ he said. ‘That will not change matters much. Society is the same everywhere. At all events, I shall always have you to come to.’ ‘It is very good of you to think that I can help you. There’s metal more attractive. The village is not everything; in the county there are some pleasant people.’ ‘If you knew how sick I am of pleasant people! In sober fact, don’t you know, I want to feel that I have something to do in the world, and if this is my sphere, to make it really so, and fill the place which you would say God had appointed for me.’ ‘Don’t you say so, Leo?’ ‘I don’t refuse to say so. I know so little. Religion has not held much place in my life. Between the abbé of the stage and the “clergyman” of the English, what have I ever known? I have not been instructed by any one, except’--he laughed a little. ‘Do you know I remember scraps among all sorts of stuff, of the hymns you used to teach me--how long, long ago!’ ‘Yes, it is very long ago.’ The room was rather dark; the day was waning. Mab outside was putting her tools together to leave off work. It was not possible for the two indoors to see each other’s faces, but there was something tremulous in Lady William’s tone. Leo Swinford put out his hand and laid it upon hers. ‘You must begin again--not with the hymns, perhaps--but to teach me what is the best way.’ Evidently there was a great deal of discrimination in what Emmy Plowden said. XI ‘Miss Grey knows, of course, everything about them. Miss Grey knows the whole story. She has been the longest here.’ ‘Yes,’ said Miss Grey, ‘I know, I suppose, all the outs and ins of it; or, if not all, a great part; all is a big word to say. I don’t suppose anybody knows all--about the simplest of us--except the Almighty who made us, and understands all our curious ways.’