When Fan became painfully conscious that she had not only her own arduous double and treble duties to attend to, she must also supply deficiencies on Harry’s part, she rose to the occasion gallantly. She added agricultural journals, treatises on husbandry, essays on farm stock, to her other diligent studies. She crammed herself; she sought to coach Harry. She tired herself to death and exposed herself to innumerable catarrhs and coughs wandering over the fields in all kinds of weather, to win him, by her close sympathetic companionship, to go among his men, or else to show them, in his interest, that there was the eye of a mistress, if not a master, on their work. She drove with Harry and Horace to the markets, and if it had not been to spare Harry’s dignity as a yeoman and his credit as a man—since poor Fan had a double object and a double terror in accompanying her husband to the towns—she would willingly have stood with him in the streets and the corn exchanges and sat with him at the inn tables. And if Fan could have been ten women instead of one, she might have saved Harry Stanhope from worldly destruction, as Mrs. Polley had rescued her husband and children. The two women did not resemble each other much in other respects, and there was little love lost between them. But they shared at least the helpfulness, command of resources, and capacity for brave effort and endurance, of the women of the trading classes—the women who have not been spoilt, and have not lost the instincts of energy and enterprise, and with it the most distant resemblance to the virtuous woman in Proverbs. This was part of Fan’s inheritance as a tradesman’s daughter, which she had neither guessed nor valued as it deserved. It is a fact established by experience that many women, both widows and spinsters, have made, when the opportunities offered themselves, good and successful farmers. Fan was a clever woman apart from book-learning; she was a woman of strong resolution, and she was stimulated and braced by every motive which she held dear. If a single mortal woman could have redeemed Harry Stanhope’s fortunes, she would have redeemed them. But the one woman must certainly have been ten, and Fan could not multiply her identity or render herself ubiquitous. She was tremendously overweighted—not only by the whole burden and anxiety of the farm’s being cast upon her, who ought to have been treated as the weaker vessel, but by the unnerving, despairing suspicion—deepening every day into hopeless conviction, that an impending wreck of other than worldly goods was to be faced and wrestled with. Harry was—in what became always more imminent and hideous danger—of being as speedily and utterly swamped in tastes, opinions, habits—all that constitute moral character, as in income and capital. In the dread and horror of that final downfall, all other falls began to look light.