 stronger lens reveals to you certain tiniest
hairlets which make vortices for these victims while the swallower waits
passively at his receipt of custom. In this way, metaphorically speaking, a
strong lens applied to Mrs. Cadwallader's match-making will show a play of
minute causes producing what may be called thought and speech vortices to bring
her the sort of food she needed.
    Her life was rurally simple, quite free from secrets either foul, dangerous,
or otherwise important, and not consciously affected by the great affairs of the
world. All the more did the affairs of the great world interest her, when
communicated in the letters of highborn relations: the way in which fascinating
younger sons had gone to the dogs by marrying their mistresses; the fine
old-blooded idiocy of young Lord Tapir, and the furious gouty humours of old
Lord Megatherium; the exact crossing of genealogies which had brought a coronet
into a new branch and widened the relations of scandal, - these were topics of
which she retained details with the utmost accuracy, and reproduced them in an
excellent pickle of epigrams, which she herself enjoyed the more because she
believed as unquestioningly in birth and no-birth as she did in game and vermin.
She would never have disowned any one on the ground of poverty: a De Bracy
reduced to take his dinner in a basin would have seemed to her an example of
pathos worth exaggerating, and I fear his aristocratic vices would not have
horrified her. But her feeling towards the vulgar rich was a sort of religious
hatred: they had probably made all their money out of high retail prices, and
Mrs. Cadwallader detested high prices for everything that was not paid in kind
at the Rectory: such people were no part of God's design in making the world;
and their accent was an affliction to the ears. A town where such monsters
abounded was hardly more than a sort of low comedy, which could not be taken
account of in a well-bred scheme of the universe. Let any lady who is inclined
to be hard on Mrs. Cadwallader inquire into the comprehensiveness of her own
beautiful views, and be quite sure that they afford accommodation for all the
lives which have the honour to coexist with hers.
    With such a mind, active as phosphorus, biting everything that came near
into the form that suited it, how could Mrs. Cadwallader feel that the Miss
Brookes and their matrimonial prospects were alien to her? especially as it had
been the habit of years for her to scold Mr. Brooke with the friendliest
frankness, and let him know in confidence that she thought him a
