societies, hopeless and uninteresting mysteries which she had no desire
to solve. She had no place in the daily routine. What was she to do
amongst it all?

Vera did what was most pleasant and also most natural to her--she did
nothing. She was by habit and by culture essentially indolent. The
southern blood she inherited, the life of the Italian fine lady she had
led, made her languid and fond of inaction. To lie late in bed, to sip
chocolate, and open her letters before she rose; to be dressed and
re-dressed by a fashionable lady's maid; to recline in luxurious
carriages, and to listen lazily to the flattery and adulation that had
surrounded her--that had been Vera's life from morning till night ever
since she grew up.

How, with such antecedents, was she to enter suddenly into all the
activity of an English clergyman's home? There were the schools, and the
vestry meetings, and the sick and the destitute to be fretted after from
Monday morning till Saturday night--Eustace and Marion hardly ever had a
moment's respite or a leisure hour the whole week; whilst Sunday, of
course, was the hardest day's work of all.

But Vera could not turn her life into these things. She would not have
known how to set about them, and assuredly she had no desire to try.

So she wandered about the garden in the summer time, or sat dreamily by
the fire in winter. She gathered flowers and decorated the rooms with
them; she spoilt the children, she quarrelled with their grandmother, but
she did nothing else; and the righteous soul of Eustace Daintree was
disquieted within him on account of her. He felt that her life was
wasted, and the responsibility of it seemed, to his over-sensitive