"Mother and daughter here show what is going on. Lady Coryston is just the full-blown _tyrannus_. She has no doubt whatever about her right to rule, and she rules for all she's worth. At the same time she knows that Demos has the last word, and she spends her time in the old see-saw between threats and cajolery. The old vicar here has told me astonishing tales of her--how she turned her own sister out-of-doors and never spoke to her afterward because she married a man who ratted to the Liberals, and the wife went with him; how her own husband dreaded her if he ever happened to differ from her politically, and a sort of armed neutrality between her and Coryston was all that could be hoped for at the best of times. "The poor people here--or most of them--are used to her, and in a way respect her. They take her as inevitable--like the rent or the east wind; and when she sends them coal and blankets, and builds village halls for them, they think they might be worse off. On the other hand, I don't see that Coryston makes much way among them. They think his behavior to his mother unseemly; and if they were he, they would use all his advantages without winking. At the same time, there is a younger generation growing up in the village and on the farms--not so much there, however!--which is going to give Lady Coryston trouble. Coryston puzzles and excites them. But they, too, often look askance; they wonder what he, personally, is going to get out of his campaign. "And then--Marcia? For in this book, this locked book, may I not call her by her name? Well, she is certainly no prophetess among these countryfolk. She takes up no regular duties among the poor, as the women of her family have probably always done. She is not at her ease with them; nor they with her. When she tries to make friends with them she is like a ship teased with veering winds, and glad to shrink back into harbor. And yet when something does really touch her--when something makes her _feel_--that curious indecision in her nature hardens into something irresistible. There was a half-witted girl in the village, ill-treated and enslaved by a miserly old aunt. Miss Coryston happened to hear of it from her maid, who was a relation of the girl. She went and bearded the aunt, and took the girl away bodily in her pony-cart. The scene in the cottage garden--Marcia with her arm round the poor beaten and starved creature, very pale, but keeping her head, and the old virago shrieking at her heels--must have been worth seeing. And there is an old man--a decrepit old road-mender, whose sight was injured in a shooting accident. She likes his racy talk, and she never forgets his Christmas present or his birthday, and often drops in to tea with him and his old wife. But that's because it amuses her. She goes to see them for precisely the same reasons that she would pay a call in Mayfair; and it's inspiriting to see how they guess, and how they like it.