The French Lieutenant’s Woman

When Charles departed from Aunt Tranter's house in Broad Street to stroll a hundred paces or so down to his hotel, there gravely--are not all declared lovers the world's fool?--to mount the stairs to his rooms and interrogate his good-looking face in the mirror, Ernestine excused herself and went to her room. She wanted to catch a last glimpse of her betrothed through the lace curtains; and she also wanted to be in the only room in her aunt's house that she could really tolerate.

"An eligible has occurred to me. Her name is Sarah Woodruff."

had not dear, kind Mrs. Poulteney taken in the French Lieutenant's Woman? I need hardly add that at the time the dear, kind lady knew only the other, more Grecian, nickname.

This remarkable event had taken place in the spring of 1866, exactly a year before the time of which I write; and it had to do with the great secret of Mrs. Poulteney's life. It was a very simple secret. She believed in hell.

Mrs. Poulteney had two obsessions: or two aspects of the same obsession. One was Dirt--though she made some sort of exception of the kitchen, since only the servants lived there--and the other was Immorality. In neither field did anything untoward escape her eagle eye.

Madam, I should rather spend the rest of my life in the poorhouse than live another week under this roof." Some gravely doubted whether anyone could actually have dared to say these words to the awesome lady. But the sentiment behind them was understood when the man came down with his bags
and claimed that he had

The sergeant major of this Stygian domain was a Mrs. Fairley, a thin, small person who always wore black, but less for her widowhood than by temperament.

During the last three years he had become increasingly interested in paleontology; that, he had decided, was his field

He returned from his six months in the City of Sin in 1856. His father had died three months later. The big house in Belgravia was let, and Charles installed himself in a smaller establishment in Kensington, more suitable to a young bachelor. There he was looked after by a manservant, a cook and two maids, staff of almost eccentric modesty for one of his connections and wealth.

When he returned to London he fingered and skimmed his way through a dozen religious theories of the time, but emerged in the clear (voyant trop pour nier, et trop pen pour s'assurer) a healthy agnostic.* What little God he managed to derive from existence, he found in Nature, not the Bible; a hundred years earlier he would have been a deist, perhaps even a pantheist. In company he would go to morning service of a Sunday; but on his own, he rarely did.
[* Though he would not have termed himself so, for the very simple reason that the word was not coined (by Huxley) until 1870; by which time it had become much needed.]

For Charles had faults. He did not always write once a week; and he had a sinister fondness for spending the afternoons at Winsyatt in the library, a room his uncle seldom if ever used