Mrs. Darcy has always set her face strongly against forenoon visitors. The claims of the parish upon her time have never--thorough-going, though not enthusiastic, clergywoman as she is--preferred at whatever hour of the day or night, found her wanting. Always the dispensary ticket, the medicine-chest, the patient ear, the sensible counsel, the wisely sharp rebuke, the warm fellow-feeling in trouble, are ready. But that idle country neighbours should drive the ploughshare of their vacuity through the furrows of her already overfilled forenoon, when they might just as easily bestow their tediousness upon her comparatively free afternoon, is beyond the limits of her patience. Her soul, though taking up its task from the beginning, with the same handsome willingness as her slender body, has from the first revolted against being nothing but a clergywoman. “When I married,” she has said to her one intimate, Lavinia Carew, “I told myself that, however much I might live in a kailyard, I would _not_ be a cabbage. I would have all the new books, the reviews, and the _heavy_ magazines, and would be quite up to date; but, my dear, I reckoned without my host. I did not forecast the frequency with which Sam Smith would come in with a broken head, and that ass Féodorovna with a broken heart.” Yet it is that very Féodorovna who, accompanied by her mother--a mode of expression which fits their mutual relations--now sits at 11.30 on the morning of the day that follows Rupert’s first outing in the Chestnuts Bath chair, in the Rectory drawing-room, without exciting any symptoms of protest on her hostess’s part. All three women are crying, but, since there are as many modes of weeping as of laughter, each in a distinctly different way. Two perfectly silent tears--evidently escaped convicts, with protesting warders behind them--are making their forbidden way down Susan Darcy’s pallid cheeks; Féodorovna has buried her face in the sofa cushion, with much appropriate flourish of White-Rose scented cambric; and Mrs. Prince is sobbing in that bang-out-loud perfectly unbridled way which betrays her plebeian origin. “Oh, Cara!” Miss Prince has just sighed out, “if you would try to control yourself! if you would not make _quite_ so much noise!” Mrs. Prince knows that when her daughter addresses her as “Cara,” she has about touched the nadir of that young lady’s good opinion, and she makes an honest effort to check her sniffs and gulps.