“But you like the choral service,” said Fanny, feeling as if everything had turned round. “When all the men of a regiment chant together you cannot think how grand it is, almost finer than the cathedral.”
“Yes, where you can do it,” said Rachel, “but not where you can’t.”
“I wish you would not talk about it,” said Grace.
“I must, or Fanny will not understand the state of parties at Avonmouth.”
“Parties! Oh, I hope not.”
“My dear child, party spirit is another word for vitality. So you thought the church we sighed for had made the place all we sighed to see it, and ourselves too. Oh! Fanny is this what you have been across the world for?”
“What is wrong?” asked Fanny, alarmed.
“Do you remember our axiom? Build your church, and the rest will take care of itself. You remember our scraping and begging, and how that good Mr. Davison helped us out and brought the endowment up to the needful point for consecration, on condition the incumbency was given to him. He held it just a year, and was rich, and could help out his bad health with a curate. But first he went to Madeira, and then he died, and there we are, a perpetual curacy of £70 a year, no resident gentry but ourselves, a fluctuating population mostly sick, our poor demoralized by them, and either crazed by dissent, or heathenized by their former distance from church. Who would take us? No more Mr. Davisons! There was no more novelty, and too much smartness to invite self-devotion. So we were driven from pillar to post till we settled down into this Mr. Touchett, as good a being as ever lived, working as hard as any two, and sparing neither himself nor any one else.”
Fanny looked up prepared to admire.
“But he has two misfortunes. He was not born a gentleman, and his mind does not measure an inch across.”