As habitually, my stepfather, Baron Skene of Evercreech, called me Gaskett. I was officially an “encumbrance” to the two, and not always spared the knowledge. Of the indifferent union which had produced me I neither was informed, nor thought to ask, anything. Curiosity was the last thing encouraged at Evercreech. That my stepfather had been a childless widower when he bestowed the lustre of his name on the obscure young widow “with an encumbrance,” was the most of my information, and, even as such, something less, probably, than the common one. The rakish reactionary (one-time famous judge of the Queen’s Bench Division, and ennobled for his services during the Salisbury administration of ’86) who, after the death of his only child and heir, young Charlie Skene, in an Alpine accident, had contracted a reckless _mésalliance_ with the lady who now bore his name, was a figure revealed only to my later understanding. Very early, I think, Lady Skene had “found religion,” as one may speak of “finding” the unpleasantly obvious. Ignorance, irreverence, and vulgarity build on every highway. There is a sort of evangelical butcher who deals with assurance in things of the flesh, and, on a simple knowledge of their parts, preaches the constitution of their spiritual anatomy. He is the purveyor of such theological joints as the vulgar understanding can recognise. Insight, imagination, erudition are strange beasts to the popular view. I think, perhaps, that Lady Skene’s early influences were to account for her natural inclinations in these respects. When I say that her marriage had socially elevated her from the ground to the leaf, without her quite shaking off the dust of her origin, I may be understood to imply that her beauty, and no exceptional quality in addition, was her fine recommendation. She had had little education, I am sure, but the education of a precise observation, which is the most excellent tutor of mind and manners, though unpossessed of the exact secret of what constitutes the _comme il faut_. That may be said, broadly, to be the secret of making a grace of necessity in all things--the secret of a frank unself-consciousness. Self-suspicion spells restraint in intercourse, and leads to gusts of mutinous self-assertion in some wrong directions. Lady Skene at least made no affectation of adopting creeds which were caviare to her understanding. She was and remained a raw evangelical through all the spiritual evolutions of fashion.