Sam's expression deepened to the impending outrage. ""Ave yer got a bag o" soot?'" He paused bleakly. "Sir."

Charles grinned.

"I know the girl. That one in the gray dress? Who is so ugly to look at?" This was unkind of Charles, since he was speaking of the girl he had raised his hat to on the previous afternoon, as nubile a little creature as Lyme could boast.

"Not exackly hugly. Leastways in looks."

"A-ha. So. Cupid is being unfair to Cockneys."

Sam flashed an indignant look. "I woulden touch 'er with a bargepole! Bloomin' milkmaid."

"I trust you're using the adjective in its literal sense, Sam. You may have been, as you so frequently asseverate, born in a gin palace-"

"Next door to one, sir."

"In close proximity to a gin palace, but I will not have you using its language on a day like this."

"It's the 'oomiliation, Mr. Charles. Hall the hosslers 'eard." As "all the ostlers" comprehended exactly two persons, one of whom was stone deaf, Charles showed little sympathy. He smiled, then gestured to Sam to pour him his hot water.

"Now get me my breakfast, there's a good fellow. I'll shave myself this morning. And let me have a double dose of muffins."

"Yes, sir."

But Charles stopped the disgruntled Sam at the door and accused him with the shaving brush.

"These country girls are much too timid to call such rude things at distinguished London gentlemen-unless they've first been sorely provoked. I gravely suspect, Sam, that you've been fast." Sam stood with his mouth open. "And if you're not doubly fast with my breakfast I shall fasten my boot onto the posterior portion of your miserable anatomy."

The door was shut then, and none too gently. Charles winked at himself in the mirror. And then suddenly put a decade on his face: all gravity, the solemn young paterfamilias; then smiled indulgently at his own faces and euphoria; poised, was plunged in affectionate contemplation of his features. He had indeed very regular ones-a wide forehead, a moustache as black as his hair, which was tousled from the removal of the nightcap and made him look younger than he was. His skin was suitably pale, though less so than that of many London gentlemen-for this was a time when a suntan was not at all a desirable social-sexual status symbol, but the reverse: an indication of low rank. Yes, upon examination, it was a faintly foolish face, at such a moment. A tiny wave of the previous day's ennui washed back over him. Too innocent a face, when it was stripped of its formal outdoor mask; too little achieved. There was really only the Doric nose, the cool gray eyes. Breeding and self-knowledge, he most legibly had.

He began to cover the ambiguous face in lather.

Sam was some ten years his junior; too young to be a good manservant and besides, absentminded, contentious, vain, fancying himself sharp; too fond of drolling and idling, lean ing with a straw-haulm or sprig of parsley cocked in the corner of his mouth; of playing the horse fancier or of catching sparrows under a sieve when he was being bawled for upstairs.

Of course to us any Cockney servant called Sam evokes immediately the immortal Weller; and it was certainly from that background that this Sam had emerged. But thirty years had passed since Pickwick Papers first coruscated into the world. Sam's love of the equine was not really very deep. He was more like some modern working-class man who thinks a keen knowledge of cars a sign of his social progress. He even knew of Sam Weller, not from the book, but from a stage version of it; and knew the times had changed. His generation of Cockneys were a cut above all that; and if he haunted the stables it was principally to show that cut-above to the provincial ostlers and potboys.

The mid-century had seen a quite new form of dandy appear on the English scene; the old upper-class variety, the etiolated descendants of Beau Brummel, were known as "swells"; but the new young prosperous artisans and would-be superior domestics like Sam had gone into competition sartorially. They were called "snobs" by the swells themselves; Sam was a very fair example of a snob, in this localized sense of the word. He had a very sharp sense of clothes style- quite as sharp as a "mod" of the 1960s; and he spent most of his wages on keeping in fashion. And he showed another mark of this new class in his struggle to command the language.

By 1870 Sam Weller's famous inability to pronounce v except as w, the centuries-old mark of the common Londoner, was as much despised by the "snobs" as by the bourgeois novelists who continued for some time, and quite inaccurately, to put it into the dialogue of their Cockney characters. The snobs' struggle was much more with the aspirate; a fierce struggle, in our Sam's case, and more frequently lost than won. But his wrong a's and h's were not really comic; they were signs of a social revolution, and this was something Charles failed to recognize.

Perhaps that was because Sam supplied something so very necessary in his life-a daily opportunity for chatter, for a lapse into schoolboyhood, during which Charles could, so to speak, excrete his characteristic and deplorable fondness for labored puns and innuendoes: a humor based, with a singularly revolting purity, on educational privilege. Yet though Charles's attitude may seem to add insult to the already gross enough injury of economic exploitation, I must point out that his relationship with Sam did show a kind of affection, a human bond, that was a good deal better than the frigid barrier so many of the new rich in an age drenched in new riches were by that time erecting between themselves and their domestics.

To be sure, Charles had many generations of servant-handlers behind him; the new rich of his time had none- indeed, were very often the children of servants. He could not have imagined a world without servants. The new rich could; and this made them much more harshly exacting of their relative status. Their servants they tried to turn into machines, while Charles knew very well that his was also partly a companion-his Sancho Panza, the low comedy that supported his spiritual worship of Ernestina-Dorothea. He kept Sam, in short, because he was frequently amused by him; not because there were not better "machines" to be found.

But the difference between Sam Weller and Sam Farrow (that is, between 1836 and 1867) was this: the first was happy with his role, the second suffered it. Weller would have answered the bag of soot, and with a verbal vengeance. Sam had stiffened, "rose his hibrows" and turned his back.

8.

There rolls the deep where grew the tree, O earth, what changes hast thou seen!

There where the long street roars, hath been The stillness of the central sea.

The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

-Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850)

But if you wish at once to do nothing and be respectable nowadays, the best pretext is to be at work on some profound study . . .

-Leslie Stephen, Sketches from Cambridge (1865)

Sam's had not been the only dark face in Lyme that morning. Ernestina had woken in a mood that the brilliant promise of the day only aggravated. The ill was familiar; but it was out of the question that she should inflict its consequences upon Charles. And so, when he called dutifully at ten o'clock at Aunt Tranter's house, he found himself greeted only by that lady: Ernestina had passed a slightly disturbed night, and wished to rest. Might he not return that afternoon to take tea, when no doubt she would be recovered?

Charles's solicitous inquiries-should the doctor not be called?-being politely answered in the negative, he took his leave. And having commanded Sam to buy what flowers he could and to take them to the charming invalid's house, with the permission and advice to proffer a blossom or two of his own to the young lady so hostile to soot, for which light duty he might take the day as his reward (not all Victorian employers were directly responsible for communism), Charles faced his own free hours.

His choice was easy; he would of course have gone wherever Ernestina's health had required him to, but it must be confessed that the fact that it was Lyme Regis had made his pre-marital obligations delightfully easy to support. Stonebarrow, Black Ven, Ware Cliffs-these names may mean very little to you. But Lyme is situated in the center of one of the rare outcrops of a stone known as blue lias. To the mere landscape enthusiast this stone is not attractive. An exceedingly gloomy gray in color, a petrified mud in texture, it is a good deal more forbidding than it is picturesque. It is also treacherous, since its strata are brittle and have a tendency to slide, with the consequence that this little stretch of twelve miles or so of blue lias coast has lost more land to the sea in the course of history than almost any other in England. But its highly fossiliferous nature and its mobility make it a Mecca for the British paleontologist. These last hundred years or more the commonest animal on its shores has been man-wielding a geologist's hammer.

Charles had already visited what was perhaps the most famous shop in the Lyme of those days-the Old Fossil Shop, founded by the remarkable Mary Anning, a woman without formal education but with a genius for discovering good-and on many occasions then unclassified-specimens. She was the first person to see the bones of Ichthyosaurus platyodon; and one of the meanest disgraces of British paleontology is that although many scientists of the day gratefully used her finds to establish their own reputation, not one native type bears the specific anningii. To this distinguished local memory Charles had paid his homage-and his cash, for various ammonites and Isocrina he coveted for the cabinets that walled his study in London. However, he had one disappointment, for he was at that time specializing in a branch of which the Old Fossil Shop had few examples for sale.

This was the echinoderm, or petrified sea urchin. They are sometimes called tests (from the Latin testa, a tile or earthen pot); by Americans, sand dollars. Tests vary in shape, though they are always perfectly symmetrical; and they share a pattern of delicately burred striations. Quite apart from their scientific value (a vertical series taken from Beachy Head in the early 1860s was one of the first practical confirmations of the theory of evolution) they are very beautiful little objects; and they have the added charm that they are always difficult to find. You may search for days and not come on one; and a morning in which you find two or three is indeed a morning to remember. Perhaps, as a man with time to fill, a born amateur, this is unconsciously what attracted Charles to them; he had scientific reasons, of course, and with fellow hobbyists he would say indignantly that the Echinodermia had been "shamefully neglected," a familiar justification for spending too much time in too small a field. But whatever his motives he had fixed his heart on tests.

Now tests do not come out of the blue lias, but out of the superimposed strata of flint; and the fossil-shop keeper had advised him that it was the area west of the town where he would do best to search, and not necessarily on the shore. Some half-hour after he had called on Aunt Tranter, Charles was once again at the Cobb.

The great mole was far from isolated that day. There were fishermen tarring, mending their nets, tinkering with crab and lobster pots. There were better-class people, early visitors, local residents, strolling beside the still swelling but now mild sea. Of the woman who stared, Charles noted, there was no sign. But he did not give her-or the Cobb-a second thought and set out, with a quick and elastic step very different from his usual languid town stroll, along the beach under Ware Cleeves for his destination.

He would have made you smile, for he was carefully equipped for his role. He wore stout nailed boots and canvas gaiters that rose to encase Norfolk breeches of heavy flannel. There was a tight and absurdly long coat to match; a canvas wideawake hat of an indeterminate beige; a massive ash-plant, which he had bought on his way to the Cobb; and a voluminous rucksack, from which you might have shaken out an already heavy array of hammers, wrappings, notebooks, pillboxes, adzes and heaven knows what else. Nothing is more incomprehensible to us than the methodicality of the Victorians; one sees it best (at its most ludicrous) in the advice so liberally handed out to travelers in the early editions of Baedeker. Where, one wonders, can any pleasure have been left? How, in the case of Charles, can he not have seen that light clothes would have been more comfortable? That a hat was not necessary? That stout nailed boots on a boulder-strewn beach are as suitable as ice skates?

Well, we laugh. But perhaps there is something admirable in this dissociation between what is most comfortable and what is most recommended. We meet here, once again, this bone of contention between the two centuries: is duty* to drive us, or not? If we take this obsession with dressing the part, with being prepared for every eventuality, as mere stupidity, blindness to the empirical, we make, I think, a grave-or rather a frivolous-mistake about our ancestors; because it was men not unlike Charles, and as overdressed and overequipped as he was that day, who laid the foundations of all our modern science. Their folly in that direction was no more than a symptom of their seriousness in a much more important one. They sensed that current accounts of the world were inadequate; that they had allowed their windows on reality to become smeared by convention, religion, social stagnation; they knew, in short, that they had things to discover, and that the discovery was of the utmost importance to the future of man. We think (unless we live in a research laboratory) that we have nothing to discover, and the only things of the utmost importance to us concern the present of man. So much the better for us? Perhaps. But we are not the ones who will finally judge.

[* I had better here, as a reminder that mid-Victorian (unlike modern) agnosticism and atheism were related strictly to theological dogma, quote George Eliot's famous epigram: "God is inconceivable, immortality is unbelievable, but duty is peremptory and absolute." And all the more peremptory, one might add, in the presence of such a terrible dual lapse of faith.]

So I should not have been too inclined to laugh that day when Charles, as he hammered and bent and examined his way along the shore, tried for the tenth time to span too wide a gap between boulders and slipped ignominiously on his back. Not that Charles much minded slipping, for the day was beautiful, the liassic fossils were plentiful and he soon found himself completely alone.

The sea sparkled, curlews cried. A flock of oyster catchers, black and white and coral-red, flew on ahead of him, harbingers of his passage. Here there came seductive rock pools, and dreadful heresies drifted across the poor fellow's brain- would it not be more fun, no, no, more scientifically valuable, to take up marine biology? Perhaps to give up London, to live in Lyme ... but Ernestina would never allow that. There even came, I am happy to record, a thoroughly human moment in which Charles looked cautiously round, assured his complete solitude and then carefully removed his stout boots, gaiters and stockings. A schoolboy moment, and he tried to remember a line from Homer that would make it a classical moment, but was distracted by the necessity of catching a small crab that scuttled where the gigantic subaqueous shadow fell on its vigilant stalked eyes.

Just as you may despise Charles for his overburden of apparatus, you perhaps despise him for his lack of specialization. But you must remember that natural history had not then the pejorative sense it has today of a flight from reality- and only too often into sentiment. Charles was a quite competent ornithologist and botanist into the bargain. It might perhaps have been better had he shut his eyes to all but the fossil sea urchins or devoted his life to the distribution of algae, if scientific progress is what we are talking about; but think of Darwin, of The Voyage of the Beagle. The Origin of Species is a triumph of generalization, not specialization; and even if you could prove to me that the latter would have been better for Charles the ungifted scientist, I should still maintain the former was better for Charles the human being. It is not that amateurs can afford to dabble everywhere; they ought to dabble everywhere, and damn the scientific prigs who try to shut them up in some narrow oubliette.

Charles called himself a Darwinist, and yet he had not really understood Darwin. But then, nor had Darwin himself. What that genius had upset was the Linnaean Scala Naturae, the ladder of nature, whose great keystone, as essential to it as the divinity of Christ to theology, was nulla species nova: a new species cannot enter the world. This principle explains the Linnaean obsession with classifying and naming, with fossilizing the existent. We can see it now as a foredoomed attempt to stabilize and fix what is in reality a continuous flux, and it seems highly appropriate that Linnaeus himself finally went mad; he knew he was in a labyrinth, but not that it was one whose walls and passages were eternally changing. Even Darwin never quite shook off the Swedish fetters, and Charles can hardly be blamed for the thoughts that went through his mind as he gazed up at the lias strata in the cliffs above him.

He knew that nulla species nova was rubbish; yet he saw in the strata an immensely reassuring orderliness in existence. He might perhaps have seen a very contemporary social symbolism in the way these gray-blue ledges were crumbling; but what he did see was a kind of edificiality of time, in which inexorable laws (therefore beneficently divine, for who could argue that order was not the highest human good?) very conveniently arranged themselves for the survival of the fittest and best, exemplia gratia Charles Smithson, this fine spring day, alone, eager and inquiring, understanding, accepting, noting and grateful. What was lacking, of course, was the corollary of the collapse of the ladder of nature: that if new species can come into being, old species very often have to make way for them. Personal extinction Charles was aware of-no Victorian could not be. But general extinction was as absent a concept from his mind that day as the smallest cloud from the sky above him; and even though, when he finally resumed his stockings and gaiters and boots, he soon held a very concrete example of it in his hand.

It was a very fine fragment of lias with ammonite impressions, exquisitely clear, microcosms of macrocosms, whirled galaxies that Catherine-wheeled their way across ten inches of rock. Having duly inscribed a label with the date and place of finding, he once again hopscotched out of science-this time, into love. He determined to give it to Ernestina when he returned. It was pretty enough for her to like; and after all, very soon it would come back to him, with her. Even better, the increased weight on his back made it a labor, as well as a gift. Duty, agreeable conformity to the epoch's current, raised its stern head.

And so did the awareness that he had wandered more slowly than he meant. He unbuttoned his coat and took out his silver half hunter. Two o'clock! He looked sharply back then, and saw the waves lapping the foot of a point a mile away. He was in no danger of being cut off, since he could see a steep but safe path just ahead of him which led up the cliff to the dense woods above. But he could not return along the shore. His destination had indeed been this path, but he had meant to walk quickly to it, and then up to the levels where the flint strata emerged. As a punishment to himself for his dilatoriness he took the path much too fast, and had to sit a minute to recover, sweating copiously under the abominable flannel. But he heard a little stream nearby and quenched his thirst; wetted his handkerchief and patted his face; and then he began to look around him.

9.

. . . this heart, I know, To be long lov'd was never fram'd; But something in its depths doth glow Too strange, too restless, too untamed.

-Matthew Arnold, "A Farewell" (1853)

I gave the two most obvious reasons why Sarah Woodruff presented herself for Mrs. Poulteney's inspection. But she was the last person to list reasons, however instinctively, and there were many others-indeed there must have been, since she was not unaware of Mrs. Poulteney's reputation in the less elevated milieux of Lyme. For a day she had been undecided; then she had gone to see Mrs. Talbot to seek her advice. Now Mrs. Talbot was an extremely kindhearted but a not very perspicacious young woman; and though she would have liked to take Sarah back-indeed, had earlier firmly offered to do so-she was aware that Sarah was now incapable of that sustained and daylong attention to her charges that a governess's duties require. And yet she still wanted very much to help her.

She knew Sarah faced penury; and lay awake at nights imagining scenes from the more romantic literature of her adolescence, scenes in which starving heroines lay huddled on snow-covered doorsteps or fevered in some bare, leaking garret. But one image-an actual illustration from one of Mrs. Sherwood's edifying tales-summed up her worst fears. A pursued woman jumped from a cliff. Lightning flashed, revealing the cruel heads of her persecutors above; but worst of all was the shrieking horror on the doomed creature's pallid face and the way her cloak rippled upwards, vast, black, a falling raven's wing of terrible death.

So Mrs. Talbot concealed her doubts about Mrs. Poulteney and advised Sarah to take the post. The ex-governess kissed little Paul and Virginia goodbye, and walked back to Lyme a condemned woman. She trusted Mrs. Talbot's judgment; and no intelligent woman who trusts a stupid one, however kind-hearted, can expect else.

Sarah was intelligent, but her real intelligence belonged to a rare kind; one that would certainly pass undetected in any of our modern tests of the faculty. It was not in the least analytical or problem-solving, and it is no doubt symptomatic that the one subject that had cost her agonies to master was mathematics. Nor did it manifest itself in the form of any particular vivacity or wit, even in her happier days. It was rather an uncanny-uncanny in one who had never been to London, never mixed in the world-ability to classify other people's worth: to understand them, in the fullest sense of that word.

She had some sort of psychological equivalent of the experienced horse dealer's skill-the ability to know almost at the first glance the good horse from the bad one; or as if, jumping a century, she was born with a computer in her heart. I say her heart, since the values she computed belong more there than in the mind. She could sense the pretensions of a hollow argument, a false scholarship, a biased logic when she came across them; but she also saw through people in subtler ways. Without being able to say how, any more than a computer can explain its own processes, she saw them as they were and not as they tried to seem. It would not be enough to say she was a fine moral judge of people. Her comprehension was broader than that, and if mere morality had been her touchstone she would not have behaved as she did-the simple fact of the matter being that she had not lodged with a female cousin at Weymouth.

This instinctual profundity of insight was the first curse of her life; the second was her education. It was not a very great education, no better than could be got in a third-rate young ladies' seminary in Exeter, where she had learned during the day and paid for her learning during the evening- and sometimes well into the night-by darning and other menial tasks. She did not get on well with the other pupils. They looked down on her; and she looked up through them. Thus it had come about that she had read far more fiction, and far more poetry, those two sanctuaries of the lonely, than most of her kind. They served as a substitute for experience. Without realizing it she judged people as much by the standards of Walter Scott and Jane Austen as by any empirically arrived at; seeing those around her as fictional characters, and making poetic judgments on them. But alas, what she had thus taught herself had been very largely vitiated by what she had been taught. Given the veneer of a lady, she was made the perfect victim of a caste society. Her father had forced her out of her own class, but could not raise her to the next. To the young men of the one she had left she had become too select to marry; to those of the one she aspired to, she remained too banal.

This father, he the vicar of Lyme had described as "a man of excellent principles," was the very reverse, since he had a fine collection of all the wrong ones. It was not concern for his only daughter that made him send her to boarding school, but obsession with his own ancestry. Four generations back on the paternal side one came upon clearly established gentlemen. There was even a remote relationship with the Drake family, an irrelevant fact that had petrified gradually over the years into the assumption of a direct lineal descent from the great Sir Francis. The family had certainly once owned a manor of sorts in that cold green no-man's-land between Dartmoor and Exmoor. Sarah's father had three times seen it with his own eyes; and returned to the small farm he rented from the vast Meriton estate to brood, and plot, and dream.

Perhaps he was disappointed when his daughter came home from school at the age of eighteen-who knows what miracles he thought would rain on him?-and sat across the elm table from him and watched him when he boasted, watching with a quiet reserve that goaded him, goaded him like a piece of useless machinery (for he was born a Devon man and money means all to Devon men), goaded him finally into madness. He gave up his tenancy and bought a farm of his own; but he bought it too cheap, and what he thought was a cunning good bargain turned out to be a shocking bad one. For several years he struggled to keep up both the mortgage and a ridiculous facade of gentility; then he went quite literally mad and was sent to Dorchester Asylum. He died there a year later. By that time Sarah had been earning her own living for a year-at first with a family in Dorchester, to be near her father. Then when he died, she had taken her post with the Talbots.

She was too striking a girl not to have had suitors, in spite of the lack of a dowry of any kind. But always then had her first and innate curse come into operation; she saw through the too confident pretendants. She saw their meannesses, their condescensions, their charities, their stupidities. Thus she appeared inescapably doomed to the one fate nature had so clearly spent many millions of years in evolving her to avoid: spinsterhood.

Let us imagine the impossible, that Mrs. Poulteney drew up a list of fors and againsts on the subject of Sarah, and on the very day that Charles was occupied in his highly scientific escapade from the onerous duties of his engagement. At least it is conceivable that she might have done it that afternoon, since Sarah, Miss Sarah at Marlborough House, was out.

And let us start happily, with the credit side of the account. The first item would undoubtedly have been the least expected at the time of committal a year before. It could be written so: "A happier domestic atmosphere." The astonishing fact was that not a single servant had been sent on his, or her (statistically it had in the past rather more often proved to be the latter) way.

It had begun, this bizarre change, one morning only a few weeks after Miss Sarah had taken up her duties, that is, her responsibility for Mrs. Poulteney's soul. The old lady had detected with her usual flair a gross dereliction of duty: the upstairs maid whose duty it was unfailingly each Tuesday to water the ferns in the second drawing room-Mrs. Poulteney kept one for herself and one for company-had omitted to do so. The ferns looked greenly forgiving; but Mrs. Poulteney was whitely the contrary. The culprit was summoned. She confessed that she had forgotten; Mrs. Poulteney might ponderously have overlooked that, but the girl had a list of two or three recent similar peccadilloes on her charge sheet. Her knell had rung; and Mrs. Poulteney began, with the grim sense of duty of a bulldog about to sink its teeth into a burglar's ankles, to ring it.

"I will tolerate much, but I will not tolerate this."

"I'll never do it again, mum."

"You will most certainly never do it again in my house."

"Oh, mum. Please, mum."

Mrs. Poulteney allowed herself to savor for a few earnest, perceptive moments the girl's tears.

"Mrs. Fairley will give you your wages."

Miss Sarah was present at this conversation, since Mrs. Poulteney had been dictating letters, mostly to bishops or at least in the tone of voice with which one addresses bishops, to her. She now asked a question; and the effect was remarkable. It was, to begin with, the first question she had asked in Mrs. Poulteney's presence that was not directly connected with her duties. Secondly, it tacitly contradicted the old lady's judgment. Thirdly, it was spoken not to Mrs. Poulteney, but to the girl.

"Are you quite well, Millie?"

Whether it was the effect of a sympathetic voice in that room, or the girl's condition, she startled Mrs. Poulteney by sinking to her knees, at the same time shaking her head and covering her face. Miss Sarah was swiftly beside her; and within the next minute had established that the girl was indeed not well, had fainted twice within the last week, had been too afraid to tell anyone ...

When, some time later, Miss Sarah returned from the room in which the maids slept, and where Millie had now been put to bed, it was Mrs. Poulteney's turn to ask an astounding question.

"What am I to do?"

Miss Sarah had looked her in the eyes, and there was that in her look which made her subsequent words no more than a concession to convention.

"As you think best, ma'm."

So the rarest flower, forgiveness, was given a precarious footing in Marlborough House; and when the doctor came to look at the maid, and pronounced green sickness, Mrs. Poulteney discovered the perverse pleasures of seeming truly kind. There followed one or two other incidents, which, if not so dramatic, took the same course; but only one or two, since Sarah made it her business to do her own forestalling tours of inspection. Sarah had twigged Mrs. Poulteney, and she was soon as adept at handling her as a skilled cardinal, a weak pope; though for nobler ends.

The second, more expectable item on Mrs. Poulteney's hypothetical list would have been: "Her voice." If the mistress was defective in more mundane matters where her staff was concerned, she took exceedingly good care of their spiritual welfare. There was the mandatory double visit to church on Sundays; and there was also a daily morning service-a hymn, a lesson, and prayers-over which the old lady pompously presided. Now it had always vexed her that not even her most terrible stares could reduce her servants to that state of utter meekness and repentance which she considered their God (let alone hers) must require. Their normal face was a mixture of fear at Mrs. Poulteney and dumb incomprehension-like abashed sheep rather than converted sinners. But Sarah changed all that.

Hers was certainly a very beautiful voice, controlled and clear, though always shaded with sorrow and often intense in feeling; but above all, it was a sincere voice. For the first time in her ungrateful little world Mrs. Poulteney saw her servants with genuinely attentive and sometimes positively religious faces.

That was good; but there was a second bout of worship to be got through. The servants were permitted to hold evening prayer in the kitchen, under Mrs. Fairley's indifferent eye and briskly wooden voice. Upstairs, Mrs. Poulteney had to be read to alone; and it was in these more intimate ceremonies that Sarah's voice was heard at its best and most effective. Once or twice she had done the incredible, by drawing from those pouched, invincible eyes a tear. Such an effect was in no way intended, but sprang from a profound difference between the two women. Mrs. Poulteney believed in a God that had never existed; and Sarah knew a God that did.

She did not create in her voice, like so many worthy priests and dignitaries asked to read the lesson, an unconscious alienation effect of the Brechtian kind ("This is your mayor reading a passage from the Bible") but the very contrary: she spoke directly of the suffering of Christ, of a man born in Nazareth, as if there was no time in history, almost, at times, when the light in the room was dark, and she seemed to forget Mrs. Poulteney's presence, as if she saw Christ on the Cross before her. One day she came to the passage Lama, lama, sabachthane me; and as she read the words she faltered and was silent. Mrs. Poulteney turned to look at her, and realized Sarah's face was streaming with tears. That moment redeemed an infinity of later difficulties; and perhaps, since the old lady rose and touched the girl's drooping shoulder, will one day redeem Mrs. Poulteney's now well-grilled soul.

I risk making Sarah sound like a bigot. But she had no theology; as she saw through people, she saw through the follies, the vulgar stained glass, the narrow literalness of the Victorian church. She saw that there was suffering; and she prayed that it would end. I cannot say what she might have been in our age; in a much earlier one I believe she would have been either a saint or an emperor's mistress. Not because of religiosity on the one hand, or sexuality on the other, but because of that fused rare power that was her essence-understanding and emotion.

There were other items: an ability-formidable in itself and almost unique-not often to get on Mrs. Poulteney's nerves, a quiet assumption of various domestic responsibilities that did not encroach, a skill with her needle.

On Mrs. Poulteney's birthday Sarah presented her with an antimacassar-not that any chair Mrs. Poulteney sat in needed such protection, but by that time all chairs without such an adjunct seemed somehow naked-exquisitely embroidered with a border of ferns and lilies-of-the-valley. It pleased Mrs. Poulteney highly; and it slyly and permanently-perhaps after all Sarah really was something of a skilled cardinal- reminded the ogress, each time she took her throne, of her protegee's forgivable side. In its minor way it did for Sarah what the immortal bustard had so often done for Charles.

Finally-and this had been the crudest ordeal for the victim-Sarah had passed the tract test. Like many insulated Victorian dowagers, Mrs. Poulteney placed great reliance on the power of the tract. Never mind that not one in ten of the recipients could read them-indeed, quite a number could not read anything-never mind that not one in ten of those who could and did read them understood what the reverend writers were on about ... but each time Sarah departed with a batch to deliver Mrs. Poulteney saw an equivalent number of saved souls chalked up to her account in heaven; and she also saw the French Lieutenant's Woman doing public penance, an added sweet. So did the rest of Lyme, or poorer Lyme; and were kinder than Mrs. Poulteney may have realized.

Sarah evolved a little formula: "From Mrs. Poulteney. Pray read and take to your heart." At the same time she looked the cottager in the eyes. Those who had knowing smiles soon lost them; and the loquacious found their words die in their mouths. I think they learned rather more from those eyes than from the close-typed pamphlets thrust into their hands.

But we must now pass to the debit side of the relationship. First and foremost would undoubtedly have been: "She goes out alone." The arrangement had initially been that Miss Sarah should have one afternoon a week free, which was considered by Mrs. Poulteney a more than generous acknowledgment of her superior status vis-a-vis the maids' and only then condoned by the need to disseminate tracts; but the vicar had advised it. All seemed well for two months. Then one morning Miss Sarah did not appear at the Marlborough House matins; and when the maid was sent to look for her, it was discovered that she had not risen. Mrs. Poulteney went to see her. Again Sarah was in tears, but on this occasion Mrs. Poulteney felt only irritation. However, she sent for the doctor. He remained closeted with Sarah a long time. When he came down to the impatient Mrs. Poulteney, he gave her a brief lecture on melancholia-he was an advanced man for his time and place-and ordered her to allow her sinner more fresh air and freedom.

"If you insist on the most urgent necessity for it."

"My dear madam, I do. And most emphatically. I will not be responsible otherwise."

"It is very inconvenient." But the doctor was brutally silent. "I will dispense with her for two afternoons."