pupils; indeed, her
knowledge of French was generally held to give a distinction to Treby itself as
compared with other market-towns. But she had won little regard of any other
kind. Wise Dissenting matrons were divided between fear lest their sons should
want to marry her and resentment that she should treat those undeniable young
men with a distant scorn which was hardly to be tolerated in a minister's
daughter; not only because that parentage appeared to entail an obligation to
show an exceptional degree of Christian humility, but because, looked at from a
secular point of view, a poor minister must be below the substantial
householders who kept him. For at that time the preacher who was paid under the
Voluntary system was regarded by his flock with feelings not less mixed than the
spiritual person who still took his tithe-pig or his modus. His gifts were
admired, and tears were shed under best bonnets at his sermons; but the weaker
tea was thought good enough for him; and even when he went to preach a charity
sermon in a strange town, he was treated with home-made wine and the smaller
bedroom. As the good churchman's reverence was often mixed with growling, and
was apt to be given chiefly to an abstract parson who was what a parson ought to
be, so the good Dissenter sometimes mixed his approval of ministerial gifts with
considerable criticism and cheapening of the human vessel which contained these
treasures. Mrs Muscat and Mrs Nuttwood applied the principle of Christian
equality by remarking that Mr Lyon had his oddities, and that he ought not to
allow his daughter to indulge in such unbecoming expenditure on her gloves,
shoes, and hosiery, even if she did pay for them out of her earnings. As for the
Church people who engaged Miss Lyon to give lessons in their families, their
imaginations were altogether prostrated by the incongruity between
accomplishments and Dissent, between weekly prayer-meetings and a conversance
with so lively and altogether worldly a language as the French. Esther's own
mind was not free from a sense of irreconcilableness between the objects of her
taste and the conditions of her lot. She knew that Dissenters were looked down
upon by those whom she regarded as the most refined classes; her favourite
companions, both in France and at an English school where she had been a junior
teacher, had thought it quite ridiculous to have a father who was a Dissenting
preacher; and when an ardently admiring schoolfellow induced her parents to take
Esther as a governess to the younger children, all her native tendencies towards
luxury, fastidiousness, and scorn of mock gentility, were strengthened by
witnessing the habits