His short-comings! the short-comings of Mr.
Carruthers of Poynings? If, indeed, in his earlier
days there had been a latent belief in the existence
of anything so undesirable and so averse to
the proper status of a county magnate, it had
long since died out. It would have been hard
and unnatural, indeed, for a man so universally
respected and looked up to, not to give in to the
general creed, and admit that there were undoubted
grounds for the wide-spread respect
which he enjoyed. There are two kinds of
"squires," to use the old English word, who exercise
equal influence on the agricultural mind,
though in very different ways. The one is the
type which Fielding loved to draw, and which
has very little altered since his time—the jocund
sporting man, rib-poking, lass-chin-chucking
franklin, the tankard-loving, cross-country-riding,
oath-using, broad-skirted, cord-breeched,
white-hatted squire. The other is the landed
proprietor, magistrate, patron of the living,
chairman of the board of guardians, supporter of
the church and state, pattern man. Mr. Carruthers
of Poynings belonged to the latter class.
You could have told that by a glance at him on
his first appearance in the morning, with his
chin shaved clean, his well-brushed hair and
whiskers, his scrupulously white linen, his carefully
tied check neckcloth, his portentous collars,
his trimmed and polished nails. His very boots
creaked of position and respectability, and his
large white waistcoat represented unspotted
virtue. Looking at him ensconced behind the
bright-edged Bible at early morning prayers,
the servants believed in the advantages derivable
from a correct life, and made an exception
in their master's favour to the doom of
Dives. By his own measure he meted the
doings of others, and invariably arose
considerably self-refreshed from the mensuration.
Hodge, ploughman, consigned to the cage after
a brawl with Giles, hedger, consequent upon a
too liberal consumption of flat and muddy ale
at The Three Horseshoes, known generally as The
Shoes, and brought up for judgment before
the bench, pleading " a moog too much" in
extenuation, might count on scanty commiseration
from the magistrate, who never exceeded his
four glasses of remarkably sound claret. Levi
Hinde, gipsy and tramp, arraigned for stealing
a loaf from a baker's shop—as he said, to save
the life of his starving child—impressed not one
whit the portly chairman of the Amherst branch
of the County Bank. Mr. Carruthers never got
drunk, and never committed theft; and that there
could be any possible temptation for other
people so to act, was beyond the grasp of his
most respectable imagination.

A man of his stamp generally shows to the
least advantage in his domestic relations. Worshipped
from a distance by outsiders, who, when
occasion forces them into the presence,
approach, metaphorically, in the Siamese fashion,
on hands and knees, there is usually a good deal
too much Grand Lama-like mystery and dignity
about the recipient of all this homage to render
him agreeable to those with whom he is brought
into daily contact. Mr. Carruthers was not an
exception to the rule. He had a notion that
love, except the extremely respectable but
rather weak regard felt by mothers towards
their infants, was a ridiculous boy-and-girl
sentiment, which never really came to anything,
nor could be considered worthy of notice
until the feminine mind was imbued with a
certain amount of reverence for the object of
her affection. Mr. Carruthers had never read
Tennyson (in common with his class, he was
extremely severe upon poets in general, looking
upon them not merely as fools, but as idle
mischievous fools, who might be better employed
in earning a decent livelihood, say as carters or
turnpike-men); but he was thoroughly impressed
with the idea that "woman is the lesser man,"
and he felt that any open display of affection on
his part towards his wife might militate against
what he considered entirely essential to his
domestic happiness—his " being looked up to."
He was in the habit of treating his wife in ordinary
matters of social intercourse very much as he
treated the newly-appointed justice of the peace
at the meetings of the magisterial bench, viz. as a
person whose position was now recognised by
the laws of society as equal to their own, but
who must, nevertheless, feel inwardly that between
him and Mr. Carruthers of Poynings there
was really a great gulf fixed, the bridging of
which, however easy it may appear, was really a
matter of impossibility.

If these feelings existed, as they undoubtedly
did in Mr. Carruthers under the actual
circumstances of his marriage, it may be imagined
that they would have been much keener,
much more intensified, had he taken to wife,
instead of the quiet widow lady whom, to the
astonishment of the county, he chose, any of the
dashing girls who had danced, dressed, and
flirted at him perseveringly, but in vain. Poynings
was a sufficiently nice place to render its
master a catch in the county, and to induce
husband-hunting misses to discount his age and
pomposity, so that when the cards of Mr. and
Mrs. Capel Carruthers were sent round (it was
before the contemptuous days of "no cards"),
and it was discovered that the new mistress of
Poynings was somebody quite out of "the set,"
immediately "that dear Mr. Carruthers" became
"that horrid old thing," and it required years
of open-handed hospitality to re-establish him
in favour.

But Capel Carruthers had chosen wisely, and
he knew it. With all his weakness and vanity, a
gentleman in thought and tastes, he had taken for
his wife a lady whose birth and breeding must
have been acknowledged in any society; a lady
whose age was not ill-suited to his own,
whose character was unimpeachable, who was
thoroughly qualified to superintend the bringing
out of his niece, and whose sole vulnerable
point for criticism—her poverty—was rendered