Stephen Anerley was slow but sure; not so very keen, perhaps, but grained with kerns of maxim'd thought, to meet his uses as they came, and to make a rogue uneasy.

To move him from such thoughts was hard; but to move him from a spoken word had never been found possible.
The wife of this solid man was solid and well fitted to him.

In early days, by her own account, she had possessed considerable elegance, and was not devoid of it even now, whenever she received a visitor capable of understanding it.

But for home use that gift had been cut short, almost in the honey-moon, by a total want of appreciation on the part of her husband.

And now, after five-and-twenty years of studying and entering into him, she had fairly earned his firm belief that she was the wisest of women.