Within the last ten years, all the forbearance which she was capable of displaying being apparently without any effect upon Sir Julian, Lady Rossiter had rather disgustedly transferred her allegiance from the Almighty, in propria persona, to God as He is found in Nature.
Nature, primarily, meant out-of-doors generally, in warm weather, and the sound of the sea two miles off, audible from beside the boudoir fire, in the colder seasons.
Lately, however, Nature had also embraced such of humanity as had its place rather lower than that of the Rossiters in the social scale.
Edna sought for the Divine Spark in her fellow-creatures, and frequently discovered it, with renewed satisfaction to herself and to its possessor.
As she often said, smiling a little:
"There's so much bad in the best of us,
There's so much good in the worst of us——"
She never finished the quotation, except by the smile, because she knew it to be at all times easy to trip over its inversions and repetitions, and thus risk the transition from the sublime to the ridiculous.
One of the most recent manifestations of what Julian had once designated in his wife's hearing as the "Hunting of the Spark," was her wholesale invitation to the staff of teachers at the College to spend Sunday afternoon at Culmhayes.
A few stray and tentative young women had availed themselves of it once, showing a marked disposition towards wandering arm-in-arm round the gardens, avoiding their hostess as much as possible, and Cooper had twice walked over from Culmouth and made nervously easy conversation to Lady Rossiter, which had dwindled into a sort of alert silence when her husband came in.