Rhoda made no reply to this thoughtless speech. Constitutionally shy (the only one of her family who had inherited her father’s life-long infirmity), this elder daughter of a wealthy house was little given to the outpouring of her inner feelings. Confidantes she had none, and so entirely undemonstrative was she of what was passing within her heart, that even her own sister had never surmised what was the _one_ chief cause of Rhoda Vavasour’s chronic state of contentment at dull and uneventful Gillingham. Kate--the restless and the ambitious “Kitty,” whom her brothers plagued and petted, and who was looked on as a kind of reckless “free lance” by her unsympathising mamma--had from her earliest girlhood entertained very exalted ideas of her elder sister’s beauty. There was not a tinge of womanly jealousy, not a fractional atom of the alloy of envy in Kate Vavasour’s nature. She knew herself to be almost what the world calls plain; but she had good eyes, a fine _élancé_ figure, and the something about her which--who can say why or wherefore?--often attracts more than beauty, be that beauty ever so exalted and refined. Of _that_ class of female attractiveness was the το καλον--the delicate charm which one man at least who knew her discovered in the fair face of Rhoda Vavasour. George Wallingford, the incumbent of the small and not very remunerative living of Switcham, was a scholar and a gentleman; a man possessed of no exalted intellect, no world-known name either for erudition or for race. Not even amongst the untitled wealthy--the millionocracy of this busy universe of ours--was the obscure rector of Switcham acknowledged as a unit, since it was from being one of the hardest of hardworking curates in the dirtiest and wickedest of manufacturing cities, that George Wallingford had been translated to what in his eyes was comparatively heaven--namely, to the spiritual superintendence of an orderly rural population. As a matter of course, Lady Millicent “took notice” of the clergyman of the parish. Three times a year, or thereabouts, Mr. Wallingford was invited to dine at the Castle, in addition to which act of condescension, the young rector--whom Lady Millicent pronounced to be “very well behaved,” “really quite a respectable person”--was graciously permitted to pay his _devoirs_ from time to time at the great house, on which occasions “milady” would lay down the law in parish matters after a fashion which--although he bore the trial with outward patience--could scarcely fail to rouse what was left in George Wallingford of the old, and unregenerate man, into a somewhat unholy state of irritation.