But, as in so many other cases, appearances were deceptive.

Her mind was greatly perturbed and her temper ruffled by the fact that it was more than a quarter past five even by the losing timepiece, that it was half-past by her large gold watch, which she held in her hand as if she were counting the pulse of the afternoon, and that, by the kitchen clock, which she felt sure was not an hour too fast, it had already struck six.
The lapse of time was rendered the more unendurable to Mrs.Jerome by her wonder that Mr.Jerome could stay out in the garden with Lizzie in that thoughtless way, taking it so easily that tea-time was long past, and that, after all the trouble of getting down the best tea-things, Mr.
Tryan would not come.
This honour had been shown to Mr.Tryan, not at all because Mrs.Jerome had any high appreciation of his doctrine or of his exemplary activity as a pastor, but simply because he was a 'Church clergyman', and as such was regarded by her with the same sort of exceptional respect that a white woman who had married a native of the Society Islands might be supposed to feel towards a white-skinned visitor from the land of her youth.

For Mrs.Jerome had been reared a Churchwoman, and having attained the age of thirty before she was married, had felt the greatest repugnance in the first instance to renouncing the religious forms in which she had been brought up.

'You know,' she said in confidence to her Church acquaintances, 'I wouldn't give no ear at all to Mr.Jerome at fust; but after all, I begun to think as there was a maeny things worse nor goin' to chapel, an' you'd better do that nor not pay your way.

Mr.Jerome had a very pleasant manner with him, an' there was niver another as kept a gig, an' 'ud make a settlement on me like him, chapel or no chapel.