For had she not in the past, like themselves, sounded the many mortifications of a governess' lot; and was she not now called up higher, promoted indeed to familiar, almost hourly, intercourse with the great?
Miss Felicia Verity was known to treat her with affection.

Mrs.Augustus Cowden, that true blue of county dames and local aristocrats, openly approved her.

She sat daily at Sir Charles Verity's table and helped to order his household.

What more genuine patents of gentility could be asked?
So they listened with a pleasure, deep almost to agitation, to her performances upon the piano, her reminiscences of Bonn and the Rhine Provinces, and, above all, to her anecdotes of life at The Hard and of its distinguished owner's habits and speech.

Thus, by operation of the fundamental irony resident in things, did Theresa Bilson, of all improbable and inadequate little people, become to the Miss Minetts as a messenger of the gods; exciting in them not only dim fluttering apprehensions of the glories of art and delights of foreign travel, but--though in their determined gentility they knew it not--of the primitive allurements and mysteries of sex.
The moral effect of this friendship upon Theresa herself was not, however, of the happiest.