There are a few such interesting youths in Holy Orders, and the curate's friend was one of them.
The party were assembled in the garden, where Mrs Sheepshanks's best tea-service was laid out.

To say that the conversation was brilliant would be an exaggeration; but it was pleasant and decorous, as conversations at a vicarage ought to be.

The two ladies compared notes about the weather and the parish; the curate asked Austin what he had been doing with himself lately; the friend kept silence, even from good words, while the vicar, one of the mildest of his cloth, sat blinking in furtive contemplation of the friend.

Certainly it was not a very exhilarating entertainment, and Austin felt that if it went on much longer he should scream.

What possible pleasure, he marvelled, could Aunt Charlotte find in such a vapid form of dissipation?
Even the garden irritated him, for it was laid out in the silly Early Victorian style, with wriggling paths, and ribbon borders, and shrubs planted meaninglessly here and there about the lawn, and a dreadful piece of sham rockwork in one corner.