It was intolerable to her exclusive maternal instinct that either virtue or happiness should exist in any degree, except a lesser measure, outside of her own household; and praise of another woman's children conveyed to her a secret disparagement of her own.

Having naturally a kind heart she could forgive any sin in her neighbours except prosperity--though as Corinna had once observed, with characteristic flippancy, "Continual affliction was a high price to pay for Aunt Harriet's favour." In her girlhood she had been a famous beauty; and she was still as fine and delicately tinted as a carving in old ivory, with a skin like a faded microphylla rose-leaf, and stiff yellowish white hair, worn a la Pompadour.

Her mind was thin but firm, and having received a backward twist in its youth, it had remained inflexibly bent for more than sixty years.

Unlike her husband she was gifted with an active, though perfectly concrete imagination--a kind of superior magic lantern that shot out images in black and white on a sheet--and a sense of humour which, in spite of the fact that it lost its edge when it was pointed at the family, was not without practical value in a crisis.
On the evening of Stephen's adventure in the Square, the Culpeper family had gathered in the front drawing-room, to await the arrival of a young cousin, whom, they devoutly hoped, Stephen would one day perceive the wisdom of marrying.

The four daughters--Victoria, the eldest, who had nursed in France during the war; Hatty, who ought to have been pretty, and was not; Janet, who was candidly plain; and Mary Byrd, who would have been a beauty in any circle--were talking eagerly, with the innumerable little gestures which they had inherited from Mrs.
Culpeper's side of the house.