Still worse, when
somebody observed that an Anti-Corn-Law lecturer was coming to
Fenmarket, and the parson's daughter cried 'How horrid!' Miss
Hopgood talked again, and actually told the parson that, so far as
she had read upon the subject--fancy her reading about the Corn-
Laws!--the argument was all one way, and that after Colonel Thompson
nothing new could really be urged.
'What is so--' she was about to say 'objectionable,' but she
recollected her official position and that she was bound to be
politic--'so odd and unusual,' observed Mrs Greatorex to Mrs Tubbs
afterwards, 'is not that Miss Hopgood should have radical views. Mrs
Barker, I know, is a radical like her husband, but then she never
puts herself forward, nor makes speeches. I never saw anything quite
like it, except once in London at a dinner-party. Lady Montgomery
then went on in much the same way, but she was a baronet's wife; the
baronet was in Parliament; she received a good deal and was obliged
to entertain her guests.'
Poor Clara! she was really very unobtrusive and very modest, but
there had been constant sympathy between her and her father, not the
dumb sympathy as between man and dog, but that which can manifest
itself in human fashion.
CHAPTER III
Clara and her father were both chess-players, and at the time at
which our history begins, Clara had been teaching Madge the game for
about six months.
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