Meanwhile, as the old servants in and about her house died or were pensioned off, they were not replaced. By the middle of the ‘eighties only a cook and a house-parlour maid sat down to meals in the vast servants’ hall where a large staff had formerly feasted. Grass grew between the flagstones in the stable yard where generations of grooms and coachmen had hissed over the grooming of hunters and carriage horses, and the one old mare which drew her wagonette when she paid calls took a turn at drawing the lawn-mower, or even the plough, betweenwhiles.

As she got poorer, she got prouder, more overbearing in manner and more acid in tone, and the girls trembled when she came into school, especially Laura, who knew that her sewing would never pass that eagle eye without stern criticism. She would work slowly along the form, examining each garment, and exclaiming that the sewing was so badly done that she did not know what the world was coming to. Stitches were much too large; the wrong side of the work was not as well finished as the right side; buttonholes were bungled and tapes sewn on askew; and the feather-stitching looked as though a spider had crawled over the piece of work. But when she came to examine the work of one of the prize sewers her face would light up. “Very neat! Exquisitely sewn!” she would say, and have the stitching passed round the class as an example.

The schoolmistress attended at her elbow, overawed, like the children, but trying to appear at her ease. Miss Holmes, in her day, had called Mrs. Bracewell ma’am and sketched a slight curtsey as she held open the door for her. The later mistresses called her Mrs. Bracewell, but not very frequently or with conviction.

At that time the position of a village schoolmistress was a trying one socially. Perhaps it is still trying in some places, for it is not many years ago that the President of a Women’s Institute wrote: “We are very democratic here. Our Committee consists of three ladies, three women, and the village schoolmistress.” That mistress, though neither lady nor woman, was still placed. In the ‘eighties the schoolmistress was so nearly a new institution that a vicar’s wife, in a real dilemma, said: “I should like to ask Miss So-and-So to tea; but do I ask her to kitchen or dining-room tea?”