Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: had a stronger will, and even fewer a more capable mind. Her intense gentleness had been a dignity, not weakness. An entirely happy life had left her will unruffled, and her really fine mind had been homekeep- ing, a trifle proud, and more than a trifle scornful of the mental equipments—outside of the vicarage itself— about her. A great many rich and leisured people— quite a few of them with minor titles—had smart country establishments in the purlieus of her husband's parish, but they were not intellectuals, they read more novels than quarterlies, attended more race-meetings than academic lectures, were more steeped in fashions than in philosophies, and the village folk were true to type, self-seeking, self-absorbed, gossipy, curious, ordinary. They read the Surrey Comet—some of them sometimes—abused the weather, asked alms directly or indirectly, but industriously, of Vicar and Squire, and took a keen rather than gracious interest in each other's births and marriages, ups and downs, debts and earnings, shortcomings and Sunday dinners. They had not interested Helen Reynolds; which was not altogether to their disadvantage. For the Vicar's wife had a shrewder gift of analysis than the Vicar had. He saw chiefly the good in every one. She saw the bad, as quickly and surely as she did the good; and her sense of justice leaned to severity rather than to mercy. She had been as devoted to Philip as he to her. But he had deserved it. A faulty husband would have had short shrift with Helen Reynolds, whose "sweetly pretty" face and soft, rippling, girlish hair enhoused a relentless judgment, an exigeant taste and unwavering determination. But she had a sweet, sunny spirit and a quick, bubbling sense of humor. She rarely smiled,but she laughed fairly often. And her wit was both pretty and tr...