Sublime

would have said that his wife was like the grit inside an oyster, polishing the pearl. She brought out the best in all who knew her.

Lady Plackett took the binoculars. Her sight was less keen than her daughter’s but she too agreed that the girl was Ruth. She turned to Miss Somerville. ‘This is unfortunate,’ she said. ‘And quite irregular. The girl is a Jewish refugee who seems to think that she is entitled to every sort of privilege.’

Among the young men their friends and neighbours, the belle jeunesse of the Colony, there were many excellent fellows, several devoted swains, and some two or three who enjoyed the reputation of universal charmers and conquerors. But the home-bred arts and the somewhat boisterous gallantry of those honest young colonists were completely eclipsed by

Lady Rothley nodded. A dark, handsome woman in her forties, she did not object to Quin’s scholarship. It happened sometimes in these old families. At Wallington, the Trevelyans were for ever writing history books.

a lady of admirable good-nature and good temper, much liked by every one who knew her, and of those ample architectural proportions that in women who are not duchesses are described by contemporary historians as stoutness.

“Her intellectual gifts do but minister to a moral character that is the noblest and best balanced I have ever met with in life.”