CHAPTER II.
HOW PEOPLE ARE TAUGHT TO HATE ONE ANOTHER.
Mrs. Rowly had been chiding her daughter for showing her temper before her husband's family, pointing out the imprudence of her conduct in such forcible language, that the young lady had promised to behave more cautiously for the future.
She greeted Mr. Rushmere with her blandest smile, and, slipping the little white hand within his arm, told him in her softest voice, "that he must teach her all about farming, as she did not know wheat from barley, or a pig from a calf."
"Lord bless your ignorance, my dear. In what part o' the world were you raised?"
"Oh, I'm a cockney, born within the sound of Bow Bells. What else can you expect of me? I never was out of London before. I am afraid I shall rival the renowned citizen, who immortalized himself by finding out that a cock neighed. I don't think however that I could be quite so foolish as that."
Old Rushmere was highly flattered by the attention paid to him by his daughter-in-law. He complimented her upon her sweet little hand and foot, and told her that he envied Gilbert his pretty wife.
Though, if the truth must be spoken, young Mrs. Rushmere had no beauty of which to boast, beyond a slight graceful figure, and the small hands and feet which had attracted the farmer's attention. Her face was something worse than plain. It was a cold, arrogant, deceitful face, with harsh, strongly marked features, and a pair of long narrow eyes, that never looked honestly or openly at any one, reminding you of some stealthy animal, ever on the watch for a deadly spring.
She loved to say things that she knew would annoy and irritate, in a cold-blooded contemptuous way, and under those half closed eyelids lurked any amount of malice and low cunning.
Though weak in intellect and very vain, she was as obstinate as a mule, and, though moving in a different position from Martha Wood, there was a great congeniality of disposition between them.