‘Really? Well then, my great-uncle, old Sir William, wished me to have it when I grew up. I was against it for a long time; took Orders; but I wanted something more stirring than a country parish. One has dreams of many things. But one’s dreams come to nothing. I got ill at Oxford. The doctors forbade the town work. The old incumbent who had held the living since my father’s death died precisely at that moment. I felt myself booked, and gave in to various friends; but it is second best.’ She felt a certain soreness and discomfort in his tone, as though his talk represented a good deal of mental struggle in the past. ‘But the country is not idleness,’ she said, smiling at him. Her cheek was leaning lightly on her hand, her eyes had an unusual animation; and her long white dress, guiltless of any ornament save a small old-fashioned locket hanging from a thin old chain and a pair of hair bracelets with engraved gold clasps, gave her the nobleness and simplicity of a Romney picture. ‘_You_ do not find it so I imagine,’ he replied, bending forward to her with a charming gesture of homage. He would have liked her to talk to him of her work and her interests. He, too, mentally compared her to Saint Elizabeth. He could almost have fancied the dark red flowers in her white lap. But his comparison had another basis of feeling than Rose’s. However, she would not talk to him of herself. The way in which she turned the conversation brought home to his own expansive, confiding nature a certain austerity and stiffness of fibre in her which for the moment chilled him. But as he got her into talk about the neighborhood, the people and their ways, the impression vanished again, so far at least, as there was anything repellent about it. Austerity, strength, individuality, all these words indeed he was more and more driven to apply to her. She was like no other woman he had ever seen. It was not at all that she was more remarkable intellectually. Every now and then, indeed, as their talk flowed on, he noticed in what she said an absence of a good many interests and attainments which in his ordinary south-country women friends he would have assumed as a matter of course.