Mrs.Folliot was one of those women who have been gifted by nature with capacity--she was conspicuous in many ways.

Her voice was masculine; she stood nearly six feet in her stoutly-soled shoes; her breadth corresponded to her height; her eyes were piercing, her nose Roman; there was not a curate in Wrychester who was not under her thumb, and if the Dean himself saw her coming, he turned hastily into the nearest shop, sweating with fear lest she should follow him.

Endued with riches and fortified by assurance, Mrs.Folliot was the presiding spirit in many movements of charity and benevolence; there were people in Wrychester who were unkind enough to say--behind her back--that she was as meddlesome as she was most undoubtedly autocratic, but, as one of her staunchest clerical defenders once pointed out, these grumblers were what might be contemptuously dismissed as five-shilling subscribers.

Mrs.Folliot, in her way, was undoubtedly a power--and for reasons of his own Pemberton Bryce, whenever he met her--which was fairly often--was invariably suave and polite.
"Most mysterious thing, this, Dr.Bryce," remarked Mrs.Folliot in her deepest tones, encountering Bryce, the day after the funeral, at the corner of a back street down which she was about to sail on one of her charitable missions, to the terror of any of the women who happened to be caught gossiping.

"What, now, should make Dr.Ransford cause flowers to be laid on the grave of a total stranger?
A sentimental feeling?
Fiddle-de-dee! There must be some reason." "I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about, Mrs.Folliot," answered Bryce, whose ears had already lengthened.