Wives and Daughters Page #2

								

for this habit of his. Lord Cumnor had certainly a little time for
gossip, which he contrived to combine with the failing of personal
intervention between the old land-steward and the tenantry. But,
then, the countess made up by her unapproachable dignity for this
weakness of the earl's. Once a year she was condescending. She and
the ladies, her daughters, had set up a school; not a school after
the manner of schools now-a-days, where far better intellectual
teaching is given to the boys and girls of labourers and work-people
than often falls to the lot of their betters in worldly estate; but
a school of the kind we should call "industrial," where girls are
taught to sew beautifully, to be capital housemaids, and pretty fair
cooks, and, above all, to dress neatly in a kind of charity uniform
devised by the ladies of Cumnor Towers;--white caps, white tippets,
check aprons, blue gowns, and ready curtseys, and "please, ma'ams,"
being de rigueur.

Now, as the countess was absent from the Towers for a considerable
part of the year, she was glad to enlist the sympathy of the
Hollingford ladies in this school, with a view to obtaining their aid
as visitors during the many months that she and her daughters were
away. And the various unoccupied gentlewomen of the town responded to
the call of their liege lady, and gave her their service as required;
and along with it, a great deal of whispered and fussy admiration.
"How good of the countess! So like the dear countess--always thinking
of others!" and so on; while it was always supposed that no strangers
had seen Hollingford properly, unless they had been taken to the
countess's school, and been duly impressed by the neat little pupils,
and the still neater needlework there to be inspected. In return,
there was a day of honour set apart every summer, when with much
gracious and stately hospitality, Lady Cumnor and her daughters
received all the school visitors at the Towers, the great family
mansion standing in aristocratic seclusion in the centre of the large
park, of which one of the lodges was close to the little town. The
order of this annual festivity was this. About ten o'clock one of the
Towers' carriages rolled through the lodge, and drove to different
houses, wherein dwelt a woman to be honoured; picking them up by ones
or twos, till the loaded carriage drove back again through the ready
portals, bowled along the smooth tree-shaded road, and deposited its
covey of smartly-dressed ladies on the great flight of steps leading
to the ponderous doors of Cumnor Towers. Back again to the town;
another picking up of womankind in their best clothes, and another
return, and so on till the whole party were assembled either in the
house or in the really beautiful gardens. After the proper amount of
exhibition on the one part, and admiration on the other, had been
done, there was a collation for the visitors, and some more display
and admiration of the treasures inside the house. Towards four
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