"
For in the country individuality has not yet emerged. People are married
or they are unmarried--that is all. Just as in London they are agreeable
or dull--that is all.
"Since I have been at Warpington," Hester said to Lord Newhaven one day,
the last time he found her in, "I have realized that I am unmarried. I
never thought of it all the years I lived in London, but when I visit
among the country people here, as I drive through the park, I remember,
with a qualm, that I am a spinster, no doubt because I can't help it. As
I enter the hall I recall, with a pang, that I am eight-and-twenty. By
the time I am in the drawing-room I am an old maid."
She had always imagined she would take up her friendship with him again,
and when he died she reproached herself for having temporarily laid it
aside. Perhaps no one, except Lord Newhaven's brothers, felt his death
more than Dick and Hester and the Bishop. The Bishop had sincerely
liked Lord Newhaven. A certain degree of friendship had existed between
the two men, which had often trembled on the verge of intimacy. But the
verge had never been crossed. It was the younger man who always drew
back. The Bishop, with the instinct of the true priest, had an unshaken
belief in his cynical neighbor. Lord Newhaven, who trusted no one,
trusted the Bishop.
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