He was sufficient for his
duties, and gave her no opportunity for the exercise of unlawful
authority, no ground for encroachments, no room for interference. But it
was very different with poor Mr. Wiley. Everybody knew that he was a
trial to her. He could not hold his own against her propensity to
dictate. He deferred to her, and contrived to thwart her, to do the very
thing she would not have done, and to do it in the most obnoxious way.
The puzzle was--could he help it? Was he one of those tactless persons
who are for ever blundering, or had he the will to assert himself, and
not the pluck to do it boldly? His refuge was in round-about
manoeuvres, and my lady felt towards him as those intolerant
Cumberland statesmen felt before their enmity made the bleak moorland
too hot for him. He was called an able man, but his foibles were
precisely of the sort to create in the large-hearted of the gentle sex
an almost masculine antipathy to their spiritual pastor. Bessie Fairfax
could not bear him, and she could render a reason. Mr. Wiley received
pupils to read at his house, and he had refused to receive a dear
comrade of hers. It was his rule to receive none but the sons of
gentlemen. Young Musgrave was the son of a farmer on the Forest, who
called cousins with the young Carnegies. As the connection was wide,
perhaps the vigorous dislike of more important persons than Bessie
Fairfax is sufficiently accounted for.
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