Miss Pritchett came up to Lucy, and Father Blantyre introduced her. Then, with an apologetic murmur, he hurried away to another part of the garden.
"Won't you sit down?" Lucy said, looking at the chair that had been left vacant by her late companion.
"Thank you, Miss Blantyre, but I've been sitting in my carriage. I should prefer to stand, if it's the same to you," said Miss Pritchett.
Lucy rose. "Perhaps you would like to walk round the grounds?" she asked.
"Probably I know the grounds better than you," the elder woman answered with a patronage which was bordering on the purely ludicrous. "This residence was one of my dear father's houses, as were many of the Hornham houses. When the vicar acquired the property, the brewery trustees sold it to him, though I think it far from suitable for a parish clergyman."
"Well, yes," Lucy answered. "It certainly is a dingy, gloomy old place, but what else can you expect down here?"
Miss Pritchett flushed and tossed her head till the aigrette in her smart little bonnet shook like a leaf.
"One is liable to be misunderstood," she said. "Your brother's small private means enable him to live in a house which the next vicar or any ordinary clergyman could hardly hope for."
"It is very good of Bernard to come down here and spend his life in such an impossible place," Lucy said. She was thoroughly angry now and quite determined to give the woman a lesson. Her impertinence was insufferable. To hear this creature speak of Bernard's income of three thousand a year—every penny of which he gave away or spent for good—in this way was unendurable.
Miss Pritchett grew redder than ever. She was utterly incapable of bearing rebuff or contradiction. Her local eminence was unquestioned. She had never moved from Hornham, where her wealth and large interests secured for her that slavish subserviency that a vain and petty spirit loves. For months past, she had been gradually gathering up cause for quarrel and bitterness with the clergy of St. Elwyn's. She had found that once within the portals of the church she was just as anyone else. She could not lord it over the priests as she wished to do. For once, she was beginning to find that her money was powerless, there was no "high seat in the synagogue" that it could buy.