Sebastian foresaw that he would have to take her in to dinner, and he glanced at her now and then, wondering what he should say to her--how keep up some kind of a conversation. She was a tall, stout, matronly woman; once she must have been an extremely handsome lass. Her black hair was still abundant, and had something of the waviness of Helena’s: her eyes, too, were dark. She was as tall as her daughter, but more lymphatic in temperament. Helena probably inherited her beauty from her mother, and her vehemence from her father. Mrs. Spenceley was accustomed to roll in her carriage through Bridgehouse and Lower Place, suburbs of Thanshope, and to look from her elevation upon the extensive matrons who stood at their cottage doors, exchanged gossip, and scolded their ingenuous offspring, sporting in the road before them; but her nature was the same as theirs. Denude her of her silks and satins, attire her in a cotton or linsey gown, with bare arms and a large apron, her hair twisted up into a knot behind, and her head capless; a cottage full of cares and unruly children, a rough ‘measter’ to make and mend and ‘do’ for, and she would have been indistinguishable from those other matrons. She would have fallen back into the old ways quite genially and naturally; she would have been what she certainly was not under existing arrangements--happy. For Mrs. Spenceley was unhappy in her riches and greatness; she could remember quite distinctly the days when Spenceley had been overlooker at one of the great Thanshope factories, and she had done the work of the house, and brought up the children single-handed, and been happy--and not genteel. She remembered the sudden leap into prosperity, the gradually increasing establishment, Helena dismissed to a fashionable boarding-school, and Fred to a private and select academy, where he was to learn how to become a gentleman--that short, easy, and every-day process, where, as a matter of fact, he had drunk in one lesson, and one only, namely, that a fellow whose father has money, and who will one day have money himself, need not know, or do, or be anything--except rich. Mrs. Spenceley remembered how servants, of whom she stood in awe, had accumulated around her; how she had had to leave her kitchen to their tender mercies; how she had found that she must not handle a duster, or have an opinion as to the merits of the heave-shoulder or the wave-breast any longer; until she had got a magnificent housekeeper, in black silk and a lace cap, who was fully conscious of the primordial fact that large and wealthy establishments only existed in order that she might domineer over one of them. How Helena was returned upon her hands, a ‘finished’ young lady, ignorant, as it seemed to Mrs. Spenceley in her own ignorance, of the very elements of a womanly education--unable to keep house, to cook, to sew, even to distinguish ribs of beef from sirloin. She had ventured,