Hester toiled back to the house breathless and dusty, and ready to cry with vexation. "They will never believe I forgot to tell them," she said to herself. "Everything I do is wrong in their eyes and stupid in my own." And she sat down on the lowest step of the stairs and leaned her head against the banisters.
To her presently came a ministering angel in the shape of Fräulein, who had begged an egg from the cook, had boiled it over her spirit-lamp, and now presented it with effusion to her friend on a little tray, with two thin slices of bread-and-butter.
"You are all goodness, Fräulein," said Hester, raising her small, haggard face out of her hands. "It is wrong of me to give so much trouble." She did not want the egg, but she knew its oval was the only shape in which Fräulein could express her silent sympathy. So she accepted it gratefully, and ate it on the stairs, with the tenderly severe Fräulein watching every mouthful.
Life did not seem quite such a hopeless affair when the little meal was finished. There were breaks in the clouds, after all. Rachel was coming to see her that afternoon. Hester was, as Fräulein often said, "easy cast down and easy cast up." The mild stimulant of the egg "cast her up" once more. She kissed Fräulein and ran up to her room, where she divested her small person of every speck of dust contracted on the road, smoothed out an invisible crease in her holland gown, put back the little ring of hair behind her ear which had become loosened in her rush after her brother, and then came down, smiling and composed, to await her friend in the drawing-room.
Hester seldom sat in the drawing-room, partly because it was her sister-in-law's only sitting-room and partly because it was the regular haunt of the Pratt girls, who (with what seemed to Hester dreadful familiarity) looked in at the windows when they came to call, and, if they saw any one inside, entered straightway by the same, making retreat impossible.
The Miss Pratts had been willing, when Hester first came into the neighborhood, to take a good-natured though precarious interest in "their Vicar's sister." Indeed, Mrs. Gresley had felt obliged to warn Hester not to count too much on their attentions, "as they sometimes dropped people as quickly as they took them up."
Hester was ignorant of country life, of its small society, its inevitable relations with unsympathetic neighbors just because they were neighbors; and she was specially ignorant of the class to which Mrs. Gresley and the Pratts belonged, and from which her aunt had in her lifetime unwisely guarded her niece as from the plague. She was amazed at first at the Pratts calling her by her Christian name without her leave, until she discovered that they spoke of the whole county by their Christian names, even designating Lord Newhaven's two younger brothers—with whom they were not acquainted—as Jack and Harry, though they were invariably called by their own family John and Henry.
When, after her aunt's death, she had, by the advice of her few remaining relatives, taken up her abode with her brother, as much on his account as her own, for he was poor and with an increasing family, she journeyed to Warpington accompanied by a pleasant feeling that, at any rate, she was not going among strangers. She had often visited in Middleshire, at Wilderleigh, in the elder Mr. Loftus's time, for whom she had entertained an enthusiastic reverence; at Westhope Abbey, where she had a firm ally in Lord Newhaven, and at several other Middleshire houses. She was silly enough to think she knew Middleshire fairly well, but after she settled at Warpington she gradually discovered the existence of a large undercurrent of society of which she knew nothing at all, in which, whether she were willing or not, she was plunged by the fact that she was her brother's sister.
Hester perceived clearly enough that her brother did not by birth belong to this set, though his profession brought him in contact with it, but he had evidently, though involuntarily, adopted it for better for worse; perhaps because a dictatorial habit is generally constrained to find companionship in a social grade lower than its own, where a loud voice and a tendency to monologue checkered by prehistoric jokes and tortured puns may meet with a more patient audience. Hester made many discoveries about herself during the first months of her life at Warpington, and the first of the series amazed her more than any of the later ones.
She discovered that she was proud. Perhaps she had not the enormous opinion of herself which Mrs. Gresley so frequently deplored, for Hester's thoughts seldom dwelt upon herself. But the altered circumstances of her life forced them momentarily upon herself nevertheless, as a burst pipe will spread its waters down a damask curtain.