She wanted equally little, it seemed, of the society
which the neighbouring district might afford. There was
a meagre routine of formal calls kept in languid operation,
Thorpe knew, but it was so much in the background that he
never came in contact with it. His own notions of the part
he ought to take in County affairs had undergone a silent
and unnoted, yet almost sweeping, change. What little
he saw of the gentry and strong local men with whom he
would have to work, quietly undermined and dismantled all
his ambitions in that direction. They were not his sort;
their standards for the measurement of things were
unintelligible to him. He did not doubt that, if he set
himself about it, he could impose his dominion upon them,
any more than he doubted that, if he mastered the
Chinese language, he could lift himself to be a Mandarin,
but the one would be as unnatural and unattractive
an enterprise as the other. He came to be upon nodding
terms with most of the "carriage-people" round about;
some few he exchanged meaningless words with upon occasion,
and understood that his wife also talked with, when it
was unavoidable, but there his relationship to the County ended,
and he was well pleased that it should be so. It gave him
a deep satisfaction to see that his wife seemed also well pleased.
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