Mr. Fairfax was not flattered: "I don't love a quick woman. A quick woman is always self-willed and wanting in feminine sweetness."
"There was never a Fairfax yet, man or woman, of mean understanding," said the lawyer. "Since the little girl has the family features, the chances are that she has the family brains, and no lack of wit and spirit."
Mr. Fairfax groaned. He held the not uncommon opinion that wit and spirit endanger a man's peace and rule in a house. And yet in the case of his son Laurence's Xantippe he had evidence enough that nothing in nature is so discordant and intractable as a fool. Then he fell into a silence, and turned his horse off the highway upon the margin of sward at one side of it. Mr. John Short took the other; and so Bessie and the boys soon lost sight of them.
It was a beautiful forest-road when they had crossed the heath. No hedges shut it in, but here and there the great beech trees stood in clumps or in single grace, and green rides opened vistas into cool depths of shade which had never changed but with the seasons for many ages. It was quite old-world scenery here. Neither clearings nor enclosures had been thought of, and the wild sylvan beauty had all its own perfect way. Presently there were signs of habitation. A curl of smoke from a low roof so lost in its orchard that but for that domestic flag it might have escaped observation altogether; a triangular green with a pond, geese and pigs; more thatched cottages, gardens, small fields, large hedges, high, bushy, unpruned; hedgerow trees; a lonely little chapel in a burial-ground, a woodyard, a wheelwright's shop, a guide-post pointing three ways, a blacksmith's forge at one side of the road, and an old inn opposite; cows, unkempt children; white gates, gravelled drives, chimney-pots of gentility, hidden away in bowers of foliage. Then a glimpse of the church-tower, a sweep in the road; the church and crowded churchyard, the rectory, the doctor's house, and a stone's throw off the "King's Arms" at the top of the town-street, which sloped gently all down hill. Another forge, tiled houses, shops with queer bow-windows and steps up to the half-glazed doors, where a bell rang when the latch was lifted. More white gates, more well-kept shrubberies; green lanes, roads branching, curving to right and left; and everywhere those open spaces of lawn and magnificent beech trees, as if the old town had an unlimited forest-right to scatter its dwellings far and wide, just as caprice or the love of beauty might dictate.