The Harden curates were the chief crook in Mrs.Elsmere's otherwise tolerable lot.

Her parish activities brought her across them perpetually, and she could not away with them.

Their cassocks, their pretensions, their stupidities, roused the Irish-woman's sense of humor at every turn.

The individuals came and went, but the type it seemed to her was always the same; and she made their peculiarities the basis of a pessimist theory as to the future of the English Church, which was a source of constant amusement to the very broad-minded young men who filled up the school staff.

She, so ready in general to see all the world's good points, was almost blind when it was a curate's virtues which were in question.