The day was sunless and lowering, but not raining, and he represented to Mrs.Thornburgh, with a hypocritical assumption of the practical man, that with rugs and mackintoshes it was possible to picnic on the dampest grass.

But he could not make out the vicar's wife.
She was all sighs and flightiness.

She 'supposed they could go,' and 'didn't, see what good it would do them;' she had twenty different views, and all of them more or less mixed up with pettishness, as to the best place for a picnic on a gray day; and at last she grew so difficult that Robert suspected something desperately wrong with the household, and withdrew lest male guests might be in the way.

T hen she pursued him into the study and thrust a _Spectator_ into his hands, begging him to convey it to Burwood.

She asked it lugubriously, with many sighs, her cap much askew.