Marian cared little for gossip of any kind
herself, but it was a godsend to her sometimes,
when she had particular reasons for
not talking to her mother of the things that
were in her mind, and did not find it easy
to invent other things to talk to her about.

The object which Marian had in view
just now, and which she had had some difficulty
in attaining, was the inducing of her
mother, who had passed the time since
her bereavement in utter seclusion, to
accept the invitation of Mr. Creswell, the
owner of Woolgreaves, the local grandee
par excellence, the person whose absence
Marian had so lamented on the occasion of
her father's illness, to pass "a long day"
with him and his nieces. It was not the
first time such an invitation had reached
Mrs. Ashurst. Their rich neighbour, the
dead schoolmaster's friend, had not been
neglectful of the widow and her daughter,
but it was the first time Marian had made
up her mind that this advance on his part
must be met and welcomed. She had as
much reluctance to break through the seclusion
of their life as her mother, though of a
somewhat different stamp; but she had been
pondering and calculating, while her mother
had been only thinking and suffering, and she
had decided that it must be done. She did
not doubt that she should suffer more in
the acting upon this decision than her
mother; but it was made, and must be
acted upon. So Marian took her mother
to Woolgreaves. Mr. Creswell had offered
to send a carriage (he rather liked the use
of the indefinite article, which implied the
extent of his establishment) to fetch the
ladies, but Marian had declined this. The
walk would do her mother good, and brace
her nerves; she meant to talk to her easily,
with seeming carelessness, of the possibilities
of the future, on the way. At length
Mrs. Ashurst was ready, and her daughter
and she set forth, in the direction of the
distressingly modern, but really imposing,
mansion, which, for the first time, they
approached, unsupported by him, in whose
presence it had never occurred to them
to suffer from any feeling of inferiority
of position or means, or to believe that any
one could regard them in a slighting
manner.

Mr. Creswell, of Woolgreaves, had
entertained a sincere regard, built on
profound respect, for Mr. Ashurst. He
knew the inferiority of his own mind, and
his own education, to those of the man who
had contentedly and laboriously filled so
humble a position—one so unworthy of his
talents, as well as he knew the superiority
of his own business abilities, the difference
which had made him a rich man, and which
would, under any circumstances, have kept
Mr. Ashurst poor. He was a man possessed
of much candour of mind and sound
judgment; and though he preferred, quite
sincerely, the practical ability which had
made him what he was, and heartily enjoyed
all the material advantages and pleasures
of his life, he was capable of profound
admiration for such unattainable things as
taste, learning, and the indefinable moral
and personal elements which combine to
form a scholar and a gentleman. He was
a commonplace man in every other respect
than this, that he most sincerely despised
and detested flattery, and was incapable of
being deceived by it. He had not failed to
understand that it would have been as
impossible to James Ashurst to flatter as to
rob him; and for this reason, as well as for
the superiority he had so fully recognised,
he had felt warm and abiding friendship
for him, and lamented his death, as he had
not mourned any accident of mortality since
the day which had seen his pretty young
wife laid in her early grave. Mr. Creswell,
a poor man in those days, struggling manfully
very far down on the ladder, which he
had since climbed with the ease which not
unfrequently attends effort, when something
has happened to decrease the value of success,
had loved his pretty, uneducated, merry
little wife very much, and had felt for a
while after she died, that he was not sure
whether anything was worth working or
striving for. But his constitutional activity
of mind and body had got the better of that
sort of feeling, and he had worked and
striven to remarkably good purpose; but
he had never asked another woman to share
his fortunes. This was not altogether
occasioned by lingering regret for his pretty
Jenny. He was not of a sentimental turn
of mind, and he might even have been
brought to acknowledge, reluctantly, that
his wife would probably have been much
out of place in the fine house, and at the
head of the luxurious establishment which
his wealth had formed. She was humbly
born, like himself, had not been ambitious,
except of love and happiness, and had had
no better education than enabled her to
read and write, not so perfectly as to foster
in her a taste for either occupation. If Mr.
Creswell had a sorrowful remembrance of
her sometimes, it died away with the reflection
that she had been happy while she
lived, and would not have been so happy