Poor little man, his grandmother shut herself
into the bookroom and cried, after her first sight of him. He was a
wretched, pinched morsel of humanity, though mamma and Emily
detected wonderful resemblances; I never saw them, but then he
inherited his mother's repulsion towards me, and roared doubly at
the sight of me. My mother held that he was the victim of Selina's
dissipations and mismanagement of herself and him, and gave many
matronly groans at his treatment by the smart, flighty nurse, who
waged one continual warfare with the household.
Accustomed to absolute supremacy in domestic matters, it was very
hard for my mother to have her counsels and experience set at
naught, and, if she appealed to Griff, to find her notions treated
with the polite deference he might have shown to a cottage dame.
A course of dinner-parties could not hinder her ladyship from
finding Chantry House insufferably dull, 'always like Sunday;' and,
when she found that we were given to Saints' Day services, her pity
and astonishment knew no bounds. 'It was all very well for a poor
object like Edward,' she held, 'but as to Mr. Winslow and Clarence,
did they go for the sake of example? Though, to be sure, Clarence
might be a Papist any day.'
Popery, instead of Methodism, was just beginning to be the bugbear
set up for those whom the world held to be ultra-religious, and my
mother was so far disturbed at our interest in what was termed
Oxford theology that the warning would have alarmed her if it had
come from any other quarter.
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