His wife, however, valued to the full the artistic privileges of living in so splendid a house, and she was not one to shrink before the searching glances of Frances Anne, the wife of the first baronet of the house of Richards, as painted by Sir Joshua, sacrificing to Venus, or to assume that Lady Elizabeth had turned aside from making a libation to Hymen--Hymen demanded quite as many sacrifices as Venus on eighteenth-century canvases--to ask her what right she had to sit in the seats of the Richards of Nethershire Castle. She knew what her husband paid in the way of rent, and she felt that the same was large enough to avert from her any indignant look that a sentimentalist might imagine on the face of the most malevolent family portrait. In fact, Mrs. Higgins considered the sum large enough to allow of her assuming the attitude of the patroness in regard to the pictures: she had actually been heard by a friend of the Richards to express a critical opinion respecting the pose of the daughter of the second baronet--the one who became well known as the Countess of Avonwater--in Romney's picture of her as Circe, and to suggest that the charger of Lieut.-Colonel Jack Churchill Richards--he was called after his father's great commander--in the picture by Sir Godfrey Kneller was scarcely large enough to make a polo pony. It was, however, clearly understood that these criticisms were offered by the lady only by way of establishing her rights over the contents of the mansion so long as her husband paid so handsomely as he did for the privilege of such an entourage. She had probably heard of certain rights-of-way being maintained by a formal walking over the ground to which they referred, by the claimant, once a year, and so she thought it well to walk over the pictures, so to speak, now and again to show that she understood the rights of her position. She really felt the greatest pride in everything, and in the course of a few years her feeling in regard to them was that of a conscientious descendant from illustrious ancestors. She was much prouder of them than the modern Major-General in _Patience_ was of his ancestors acquired by purchase. A visit that I paid to the Castle in the temporary possession of the family of Higgins was illuminating. I went not because I had ever met either Mr. or Mrs. Higgins, but because I was acquainted with Miss Richards, a charming old lady who was the sister of the unhappy baronet, and had been born in the Castle and lived there for twenty-five or thirty years, only leaving for the dower-house on the death of her mother.