The vicar's wife had not a richer silk or costlier shawl; no manufacturer's daughter finer feathers or more elegant bracelet. But Martha would have preferred a much homelier garb and a necklace of beads or jet; she asked only to slink unnoticed through her chill life, and had an half-formulated idea that her father dressed her as he did his shop windows, in the way of trade and to abash his neighbours. Martha had practically no friends. The daughters of the manufacturers could, of course, not be expected to have more than a go-to-meeting, bowing acquaintance with a shop-keeper's daughter, though that shop-keeper was popularly supposed to be able to buy up any two mill-owners put together. To be sure the Rev. David Jones, the pastor at Aenon Chapel, and Mrs. David Jones and Miss Lydia Jones called at times and dutifully partook of tea and muffins in the sitting-room above the shop from which no ingenuity had been efficient to bar the insidious blend of many odours from the store beneath, and true also Martha was a constant attender at Dorcas meetings, class meetings, prayer meetings, and Chapel and Sunday School tea-parties, called by the scoffing and ungodly herd, "muffin-worrys." But Martha was constrained, awkward, _gauche_, and though her heart, was ready to go half-way to meet an overture, she could not make an advance. Little children were not allured to her, girls of her own age ridiculed whilst they envied her dress jewellery, staider matrons thought it shame that grasping miser's scarecrow daughter should "peark" herself out in dainty raiment whilst their own well favoured ones went in cheap cottons or plain home-spun.