But before many years had passed young Phineas, who had the reputation of being the longest-headed man that had ever been a Wadhurst, perceived that the conditions under which agriculture was carried on with a profit had changed considerably. He saw that the day of English wheat was pretty nearly over, but that if the day of wheat was over, the day of other things was dawning, and it was because he became the pioneer of profits that people called him long-headed. While his neighbours grumbled he experimented. The result was that in the course of five years he was making money more rapidly than it had ever been made out of the wheat. “Golden grain,” it had been called long ago. Phineas Wadhurst smiled. Golden butter was what he had his eye on--golden swedes which he grew for his cattle, so that every bullock became bullion and every heifer a mint. And then he did a foolish thing. He got married. The woman he chose was a “lady.” The English agriculturist’s ideal lady is some one who has had nothing to do with farming all her life; just as his ideal gentleman is a retired English shopkeeper. Eleanor Glynde was one of the daughters of a hardworking doctor in general practice in the little town of Limborough. She was an austere woman of thirty, of a pale complexion, which in the eyes of every agricultural community is the stamp of gentility in a lady. Mrs. Wadhurst took no interest in the cultivation of anything except her own pallor. She had once been known as the Lily of Limborough, and she lived in the perpetual remembrance of this tradition. She did not annoy her husband very much; and though there were a good many people who said that Phineas Wadhurst would have shown himself to be longer-headed if he had married a woman in his own station in life, who would have looked after the dairy and kept all the “hands” busy, yet the man felt secretly proud of his wife’s idleness and of her attention to her complexion. She read her novels and worked in crewels, and after five years became the mother of a girl, who grew up to be an extremely attractive creature, but a creature of whom her mother found great difficulty in making a lady. Mrs. Wadhurst’s ideal lady did not differ greatly from the ideal of the agriculturists; only she added to their definition a rider that she was to be one who should be visited by Framsby. To be on visiting terms with Framsby represented the height of her social ambition.