unless you have any more commands.«
    »No, Denner; I am going down immediately.«
    As Mrs Transome descended the stone staircase in her old black velvet and
point, her appearance justified Denner's personal compliment. She had that
high-born imperious air which would have marked her as an object of hatred and
reviling by a revolutionary mob. Her person was too typical of social
distinctions to be passed by with indifference by any one; it would have fitted
an empress in her own right, who had had to rule in spite of faction, to dare
the violation of treaties and dread retributive invasions, to grasp after new
territories, to be defiant in desperate circumstances, and to feel a woman's
hunger of the heart for ever unsatisfied. Yet Mrs Transome's cares and
occupations had not been at all of an imperial sort. For thirty years she had
led the monotonous narrowing life which used to be the lot of our poorer gentry,
who never went to town, and were probably not on speaking terms with two out of
the five families whose parks lay within the distance of a drive. When she was
young she had been thought wonderfully clever and accomplished, and had been
rather ambitious of intellectual superiority - had secretly picked out for
private reading the lighter parts of dangerous French authors - and in company
had been able to talk of Mr Burke's style, or of Chateaubriand's eloquence - had
laughed at the Lyrical Ballads and admired Mr Southey's »Thalaba.« She always
thought that the dangerous French writers were wicked, and that her reading of
them was a sin; but many sinful things were highly agreeable to her, and many
things which she did not doubt to be good and true were dull and meaningless.
She found ridicule of Biblical characters very amusing, and she was interested
in stories of illicit passion: but she believed all the while that truth and
safety lay in due attendance on prayers and sermons, in the admirable doctrines
and ritual of the Church of England, equally remote from Puritanism and Popery;
in fact, in such a view of this world and the next as would preserve the
existing arrangements of English society quite unshaken, keeping down the
obtrusiveness of the vulgar and the discontent of the poor. The history of the
Jews, she knew, ought to be preferred to any profane history; the Pagans, of
course, were vicious, and their religions quite nonsensical, considered as
religions - but classical learning came from the Pagans; the Greeks were famous
for sculpture; the Italians for painting; the middle ages were dark and
papistical