Chapter III. Mrs. Blake Speaks her Mind on Several Matters

Breakfast was barely over the next morning when Jim Weatherby
appeared at the kitchen door carrying a package of horseshoe
nails and a small hammer.

"I thought perhaps Christopher might want to use the mare early,"
he explained to Cynthia, who was clearing off the table. There
was a pleasant precision in his speech, acquired with much
industry at the little country school, and Cynthia, despite her
rigid disfavour, could not but notice that when he glanced round
the room in search of Lila he displayed the advantage of an
aristocratic profile. Until to-day she could not remember that
she had ever seen him directly, as it were; she had looked around
him and beyond him, much as she might have obliterated from her
vision a familiar shrub that chanced to intrude itself into her
point of view. The immediate result of her examination was the
possibility she dimly acknowledged that a man might exist as a
well-favoured individual and yet belong to an unquestionably
lower class of life.

"Well, I'll go out to the stable," added Jim, after a moment in
which he had patiently submitted to her squinting observation.
"Christopher will be somewhere about, I suppose?"

"Oh, I suppose so," replied Cynthia indifferently, emptying the
coffee-grounds into the kitchen sink. The asperity of her tone
was caused by the entrance of Lila, who came in with a basin of
corn-meal dough tucked under her bared arm, which showed as round
and delicate as a child's beneath her loosely rolled-up sleeve.