Shrewd as Fan was, she became thoroughly taken in by the stranger. Fan learnt to believe in Agneta, and there was relief and joy in the belief, as entirely as Fan believed, with more reason where single-heartedness was concerned, in Harry. After all, Agneta, though she was fond of Fan, liked Oliver still better. He was neither her victim nor her slave, though he could not help admiring what was admirable in her high breeding, and natural sweetness and affectionateness, and being tolerant and kind to her. He was not a son of the soil, neither had he been brought up in such total unfamiliarity with girls of Agneta Stanhope’s stamp that he should fall down and worship her, caught chiefly by the charm of her conventional grace and refinement in their contrast with the conventional uncouthness and vulgarity of the girls he had previously known. To Oliver Constable’s mind there was a considerable amount of snobbery and caddishness—an absolute disloyalty to all which lies below the immediate surface—in this ready subserviency of the self-made man to the material advantages of the first conventional lady with whom he comes in close contact. And as fine feathers did not necessarily make fine birds to Oliver, he had been tempted to feel a grim satisfaction when he read of such men’s being played with and fooled by exquisite triflers who had subdued their captives, almost without an effort, by trifles light as air. ‘Serve the duffers right,’ Oliver had growled. He had imagined that if he were to love a woman with his whole heart and soul, it would be the woman independent of the attributes of any station, the noble woman, who, if she were technically as well as ideally a lady, would be as indifferent to mere technicalities, perhaps as weary of them, as Catherine Hilliard often looked.