The vicar coughed. “Lady Cotton is an example to us all.” This was oil on the flames—as he was perhaps not unaware.

“I should visit.”

“That would be excellent.”

“It is that visiting always so distresses me.” The vicar was unhelpful. “I know it is wicked of me.”

“Come come.”

“Yes. Very wicked.”

A long silence followed, in which the vicar meditated on his dinner, still an hour away, and Mrs. Poulteney on her wickedness. She then came out, with an unaccustomed timidity, with a compromise solution to her dilemma.

“If you knew of some lady, some refined person who has come upon adverse circumstances…”

“I am not quite clear what you intend.”

“I wish to take a companion. I have difficulty in writing now. And Mrs. Fairley reads so poorly. I should be happy to provide a home for such a person.”

“Very well. If you so wish it. I will make inquiries.” Mrs. Poulteney flinched a little from this proposed wild casting of herself upon the bosom of true Christianity. “She must be of irreproachable moral character. I have my servants to consider.”

“My dear lady, of course, of course.” The vicar stood. “And preferably without relations. The relations of one’s dependents can become so very tiresome.”

“Rest assured that I shall not present anyone unsuitable.” He pressed her hand and moved towards the door. “And Mr. Forsythe, not too young a person.” He bowed and left the room. But halfway down the stairs to the ground floor, he stopped. He remembered. He reflected. And perhaps an emotion not absolutely unconnected with malice, a product of so many long hours of hypocrisy—or at least a not always complete frankness—at Mrs. Poulteney’s bombazined side, at any rate an impulse made him turn and go back to her drawing room. He stood in the doorway.

“An eligible has occurred to me. Her name is Sarah Woodruff.”

Ernestina had exactly the right face for her age; that is, small-chinned, oval, delicate as a violet. You may see it still in the drawings of the great illustrators of the time—in Phiz’s work, in John Leech’s. Her gray eyes and the paleness of her skin only enhanced the delicacy of the rest. At first meetings she could cast down her eyes very prettily, as if she might faint should any gentleman dare to address her. But there was a minute tilt at the corner of her eyelids, and a corresponding tilt at the corner of her lips—to extend the same comparison, as faint as the fragrance of February violets—that denied, very subtly but quite unmistakably, her apparent total obeisance to the great god Man. An orthodox Victorian would perhaps have mistrusted that imperceptible hint of a Becky Sharp; but to a man like Charles she proved irresistible. She was so very nearly one of the prim little moppets, the Georginas, Victorias, Albertinas, Matildas and the rest who sat in their closely guarded dozens at every ball; yet not quite.

When Charles departed from Aunt Tranter’s house in Broad Street to stroll a hundred paces or so down to his hotel, there gravely—are not all declared lovers the world’s fool?—to mount the stairs to his rooms and interrogate his good-looking face in the mirror, Ernestine excused herself and went to her room. She wanted to catch a last glimpse of her betrothed through the lace curtains; and she also wanted to be in the only room in her aunt’s house that she could really tolerate.

Having duly admired the way he walked and especially the manner in which he raised his top hat to Aunt Tranter’s maid, who happened to be out on an errand; and hated him for doing it, because the girl had pert little Dorset peasant eyes and a provokingly pink complexion, and Charles had been strictly forbidden ever to look again at any woman under the age of sixty—a condition Aunt Tranter mercifully escaped by just one year—Ernestina turned back into her room. It had been furnished for her and to her taste, which was emphatically French; as heavy then as the English, but a little more gilt and fanciful. The rest of Aunt Tranter’s house was inexorably, massively, irrefutably in the style of a quarter-century before: that is, a museum of objects created in the first fine rejection of all things decadent, light and graceful, and to which the memory or morals of the odious Prinny, George IV, could be attached.

Nobody could dislike Aunt Tranter; even to contemplate being angry with that innocently smiling and talking—especially talking—face was absurd. She had the profound optimism of successful old maids; solitude either sours or teaches self-dependence. Aunt Tranter had begun by making the best of things for herself, and ended by making the best of them for the rest of the world as well.

However, Ernestina did her best to be angry with her; on the impossibility of having dinner at five; on the subject of the funereal furniture that choked the other rooms; on the subject of her aunt’s oversolicitude for her fair name (she would not believe that the bridegroom and bride-to-be might wish to sit alone, and walk out alone); and above all on the subject of Ernestina’s being in Lyme at all.

The poor girl had had to suffer the agony of every only child since time began—that is, a crushing and unrelenting canopy of parental worry. Since birth her slightest cough would bring doctors; since puberty her slightest whim summoned decorators and dressmakers; and always her slightest frown caused her mama and papa secret hours of self-recrimination. Now this was all very well when it came to new dresses and new wall hangings, but there was one matter upon which all her bouderies and complaints made no impression. And that was her health. Her mother and father were convinced she was consumptive. They had only to smell damp in a basement to move house, only to have two days’ rain on a holiday to change districts. Half Harley Street had examined her, and found nothing; she had never had a serious illness in her life; she had none of the lethargy, the chronic weaknesses, of the condition. She could have—or could have if she had ever been allowed to—danced all night; and played, without the slightest ill effect, battledore all the next morning. But she was no more able to shift her doting parents’ fixed idea than a baby to pull down a mountain. Had they but been able to see into the future! For Ernestina was to outlive all her generation. She was born in 1846. And she died on the day that Hitler invaded Poland.

An indispensable part of her quite unnecessary regimen was thus her annual stay with her mother’s sister in Lyme. Usually she came to recover from the season; this year she was sent early to gather strength for the marriage. No doubt the Channel breezes did her some good, but she always descended in the carriage to Lyme with the gloom of a prisoner arriving in Siberia. The society of the place was as up-to-date as Aunt Tranter’s lumbering mahogany furniture; and as for the entertainment, to a young lady familiar with the best that London can offer it was worse than nil. So her relation with Aunt Tranter was much more that of a high-spirited child, an English Juliet with her flat-footed nurse, than what one would expect of niece and aunt. Indeed, if Romeo had not mercifully appeared on the scene that previous winter, and promised to share her penal solitude, she would have mutinied; at least, she was almost sure she would have mutinied. Ernestina had certainly a much stronger will of her own than anyone about her had ever allowed for—and more than the age allowed for. But fortunately she had a very proper respect for convention; and she shared with Charles—it had not been the least part of the first attraction between them—a sense of self-irony. Without this and a sense of humor she would have been a horrid spoiled child; and it was surely the fact that she did often so apostrophize herself (“You horrid spoiled child”) that redeemed her.