I am not sure either whether it was Lady Jane’s intention to enhance the effect of Dr. Burnet by the extreme dulness of the household background upon which she set him, so to speak, to impress the mind of Katherine. There was no party at Steephill. Sir John, though everything that was good and kind, was dull; the tutor, who was a young man fresh from the University, and no doubt might have been very intellectual or very frivolous had there been anything to call either gifts out, was dull also because of having little encouragement to be anything else. Lady Jane indeed was not dull, but she had no call upon her for any exertion; and the tone of the house was humdrum beyond description. The old clergyman dined habitually at Steephill on the Sunday evenings, and he was duller still, though invested to Katherine with a little interest as the man who had officiated at her sister’s marriage. But he could not be got to recall the circumstance distinctly, nor to master the fact that this Miss Tredgold was so closely related to the young lady whom he had made into Lady Somers. “Dear! dear! to think of that!” he had said when the connection had been explained to him, but what he meant by that exclamation nobody knew. I think it very likely that Lady Jane herself was not aware how dull her house was when in entire repose, until she found it out by looking through the eyes of a chance guest like Katherine. “What in thunder did you mean by bringing that poor girl here to bore her to death, when there’s nobody in the house?” Sir John said, whose voice was like a westerly gale. “Really, Katherine, I did not remember how deadly dull we were,” Lady Jane said apologetically. “It suits us well enough--Sir John and myself; but it’s a shame to have asked you here when there’s nobody in the house, as he says. And Sunday is the worst of all, when you can’t have even your needlework to amuse you. But there are some people coming to dinner to-morrow.” Katherine did her best to express herself prettily, and I don’t think even that she felt the dulness so much as she was supposed to do. The routine of a big family house, the machinery of meals and walks and drives and other observances, the children bursting in now and then, the tutor appearing from time to time tremendously _comme il faut_, and keeping up his equality, Sir John, not half so careful, rolling in from the inspection of his stables or his turnips with a noisy salutation, “You come out with me after lunch, Miss Tredgold, and get a blow over the downs, far better for you than keeping indoors.” And then after that blow on the downs, afternoon tea, and Mr. Montgomery rubbing his hands before the fire, while he asked, without moving, whether he should hand the kettle. All this was mildly amusing, in the proportion of its dulness, for a little while. We none of us, or at least few of us, feel heavily this dull procession of the hours when it is our own life; when it is another’s, our perceptions are more clear.