There were Father and Mother, Uncle Samuel and Aunt Amy, all with presents, faces of birthday tolerance and “do-as-you-please-to-day, dear” expressions.
The Rev. Herbert Cole was forty years of age, rector of St. James's, Polchester, during the last ten years, and marked out for greater preferment in the near future. To be a rector at thirty is unusual, but he had great religious gifts, preached an admirable “as-man-to-man” sermon, and did not believe in thinking about more than he could see. He was an excellent father in the abstract sense, but the parish absorbed too much of his time to allow of intimacies with anyone.
Mrs. Cole was the most placid lady in Europe. She had a comfortable figure, but was not stout, here a dimple and there a dimple. Nothing could disturb her. Children, servants, her husband's sermons, district visiting, her Tuesday “at homes,” the butcher, the dean's wife, the wives of the canons, the Polchester climate, bills, clothes, other women's clothes--over all these rocks of peril in the sea of daily life her barque happily floated. Some ill-natured people thought her stupid, but in her younger days she had liked Trollope's novels in the Cornhill, disapproved placidly of “Jane Eyre,” and admired Tennyson, so that she could not be considered unliterary.
She was economical, warm-hearted, loved her children, talked only the gentlest scandal, and was a completely happy woman--all this in the placidest way in the world. Miss Amy Trefusis, her sister, was very different, being thin both in her figure and her emotions. She skirted tempestuously over the surface of things, was the most sentimental of human beings, was often in tears over reminiscences of books or the weather, was deeply religious in a superficial way, and really--although she would have been entirely astonished had you told her so--cared for no one in the world but herself. She was dressed always in dark colours, with the high shoulders of the day, elegant bonnets and little chains that jingled as she moved. In her soul she feared and distrusted children, but she did not know this. She did know, however, that she feared and distrusted her brother Samuel.
Her brother Samuel was all that the Trefusis family, as a conservative body who believed in tradition, had least reason for understanding. He had been a failure from the first moment of his entry into the Grammar School in Polchester thirty-five years before this story. He had continued a failure at Winchester and at Christ Church, Oxford. He had desired to be a painter; he had broken from the family and gone to study Art in Paris. He had starved and starved, was at death's door, was dragged home, and there suddenly had relapsed into Polchester, lived first on his father, then on his brother-in-law, painted about the town, painted, made cynical remarks about the Polcastrians, painted, made blasphemous remarks about the bishop, the dean and all the canons, painted, and refused to leave his brother-in-law's house. He was a scandal, of course; he was fat, untidy, wore a blue tam-o'-shanter when he was “out,” and sometimes went down Orange Street in carpet slippers.