But Oliver would not consent to be treated as a spectacle for men and angels. When he found he was to be smilingly stared at, pumped dry, and rallied, he broke off, rashly perhaps, his intercourse with his old masters, and Fan, who had shown she was capable of bridling her own pride and compelling it to go in harness, could not, in the middle of her mortification, conquer her sore pride for Oliver so as to make any effectual resistance to the renunciation of their connection with professional and better-bred Friarton. Before Harry Stanhope had appeared on the scene to change the current of her ideas and reinspirit her, she had given in gloomily to Oliver’s determination to decline the few and wary invitations extended jointly to the brother and sister after Oliver’s return home, by the heads of the best houses in Friarton. The would be hosts and hostesses took the unsatisfactory couple at their word with a rapidity that savoured of relief. ‘The Constables know their own place best, after all,’ said the high contending faction among themselves, with admirable candour. ‘We are not going to force them to continue to come to our houses, when they may have felt themselves not at home all the time, though we did what we could to put these young persons at their ease.’ ‘Constable has grown up an awkward brutally abrupt fellow, full of angles and crotchets. He has nothing conciliatory about him,’ said Mr. Fremantle, who was himself eminently gliding in his progress through the world. ‘I don’t believe now, that he would ever get over his original disadvantages—clever as he undoubtedly is—in a different sphere. So, no doubt, he judges wisely in falling back into the old track, where he may be as rude and overbearing as he likes. Probably we erred in tempting him from it, though it seemed a pity that talents like his should be wasted in a mill and bakehouse.’ ‘And you know, my dear,’ said Mrs. Fremantle, who was by temperament caressing, and in the absence of other channels for her social affectionateness, became necessarily the bosom friend of Mrs. Wright, though the two were only sympathetic on class grounds, ‘good schools have not done everything for Miss Constable.’ ‘Yes,’ answered Mrs. Wright. But in spite of her assent she was a tiresome woman, in doubt about everything, given to argue the conclusiveness of the plainest proposition. Thus she immediately turned and contended. ‘But they were excellent schools. The plain old father, and the brother with more ambitious views in those days, made a good selection. Miss Constable was at a school at Norwood, where my cousin Constantia’s daughters went afterwards, and she left it for Madame Fléchier’s in Brussels, where Miss Hilliard’s nieces the Cholmondeley girls finished their education. By-the-by,’ added Mrs. Wright, in fresh helpless uncertainty, ‘they count some relationship with the Constables.’