Consequently she gave herself airs, and occasionally let
fall, to the great displeasure of the Cowfold ladies, words which
implied some disparagement of Cowfold. She was a shortish, stout,
upright little woman, who used a large fan and spoke with an accent
strange to the Midlands. She was not a great help to the minister,
because she was not sufficiently flexible and insinuating for her
position; but nevertheless they always worked together, and she
followed as well as she could the directions of her astuter husband,
who, considering his bovine cast, was endowed with quite a
preternatural sagacity in the secular business of his profession.
On this particular afternoon, however, the subject of the
conversation was not the congregation, but young Thomas Broad, aged
eighteen, the exact, and almost ridiculously exact, counterpart of
his father. He had never been allowed to go to school, but had been
taught at home. There was only one day-school in Cowfold, and his
mother objected to the "mixture." She had been heard to say as much,
and Cowfold resented this too, and the Cowfold youths resented it by
holding Tommy Broad in extreme contempt. He had never been properly
a boy, for he could play at no boyish games; had a tallowy,
unpleasant complexion, went for formal walks, and carried gloves.
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