50 The Real Charlotte. 



proper place in the county and settle down at Bruflf. Thus 

 Lady Eyrefield, and Mrs. Waller, and their like, the careful 

 mothers of those contemporaneous daughters, and thus also, 

 after their kind, the lesser ladies of Lismoyle. 



But though Christopher was now seven and twenty he 

 seemed as far from " taking his place in the county " as he 

 had ever been. His mother's friends had no particular 

 fault to find with him ; that was a prominent feature in their 

 dissatisfaction. He was quite good-looking enough for an 

 eldest son, and his politeness to their daughters left them 

 nothing to complain of except the discouraging fact that it 

 was exceeded by his politeness to themselves. His readi- 

 ness to talk when occasion demanded was undisputed, but 

 his real or pretended dulness in those matters of local in- 

 terest, which no one except an outsider calls gossip, made 

 conversation with him a hollow and heartless affair. One 

 of his most exasperating points was that he could not be 

 referred to any known type. He was '' between the sizes," 

 as shopmen say of gloves. He was not smart and aggres- 

 sive enough for the soldiering type, nor sporting enough for 

 the country gentleman, but neither had he the docility and 

 attentiveness of the ideal curate; he could not even be lightly 

 disposed of as an eccentricity, which would have been some 

 sort of consolation. 



" If I ever could have imagined that Isabel Dysart's son 

 would have turned out like this," said the Dowager Lady 

 Eyrefield, in a moment of bitterness, " I should not have 

 given myself the trouble of writing to Castleraore about 

 taking him out as his secretary. I thought all those func- 

 tions and dinner parties would have done something for 

 him, but though they polished up his manners, and im- 

 proved that most painful and unfortunate stutter, he's at 

 heart just as much a stick as ever," 



Lismoyle was, according to its lights, equally nonplussed. 

 Mrs. Baker had, indeed, suggested that it was sending him 

 to these grand English universities, instead of to Trinity 

 College, Dublin, that had taken the fun out of him in the 

 first going off, and what finished him was going out to those 

 Barbadoes, with all the blacks bowing down to him, and his 

 liver growing the size of I don't know what with the heat. 

 Mrs. Corkran, the widow of the late rector of Lismoyle, had. 



