He was a portly man, with a place in the country, and a house in town; not
rich for his position, but well off; a magistrate, and much respected;
well educated in the ideas of the ancients, with whom his own ideas on
many subjects stopped short, and hardly to be called intellectual; a
moderate Churchman, a bigoted Conservative, narrow and strongly prejudiced
rather than highly principled. He was quite ignorant of the moral progress
of the world at the present time, and ready to resent even the upward
tendency of evolution when it presented itself to him in the form of any
change, including, of course, changes for the better, and more especially
so if such change threatened to bring about an improvement in the position
of women, or increase the weight of their influence for good in the world.
The mere mention of the subject made him rabid, and he grew apoplectic
whenever he reflected upon the monstrous pretensions of the sex at the
present time. But the thing that roused his scorn and indignation most was
when a woman ventured to enter any protest against the established order
of iniquity. He allowed that a certain number of women must of necessity
be abandoned, and raised no objection to that; but what he did consider
intolerable was that any one woman should make a stand against the
degradation of her own sex. He thought that immoral.

He was well enough to live with, however, this obstinate English country
gentleman, although without sympathetic insight, and liable to become a
petty domestic tyrant at any moment. "Sound" was what he would have called
himself. And he was a man to be envied upon the whole, for his family
loved him, and his friends knew no ill of him.




CHAPTER II.