Theobald did not lay so much
stress on this as she did, but as she settled what he should have at
dinner she could take care that he got no strangled fowls; as for black
puddings, happily, he had seen them made when he was a boy, and had never
got over his aversion for them. She wished the matter were one of more
general observance than it was; this was just a case in which as Lady
Winchester she might have been able to do what as plain Mrs Pontifex it
was hopeless even to attempt.
And thus this worthy couple jogged on from month to month and from year
to year. The reader, if he has passed middle life and has a clerical
connection, will probably remember scores and scores of rectors and
rectors' wives who differed in no material respect from Theobald and
Christina. Speaking from a recollection and experience extending over
nearly eighty years from the time when I was myself a child in the
nursery of a vicarage, I should say I had drawn the better rather than
the worse side of the life of an English country parson of some fifty
years ago. I admit, however, that there are no such people to be found
nowadays. A more united or, on the whole, happier, couple could not have
been found in England.
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