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A MOTOR-FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE self in the sinister gloom of Wildfell Hall rather than in the light temperate air of a French province. And somehow, unreasonably of course, one expects the house to bear, even outwardly, some mark of that dark disordered period—or, if not, then of the cheerful but equally incoherent and inconceivable existence led there when the timid Madame Dudevant was turning into the great George Sand, and the strange procession which continued to stream through the house was composed no longer of drunken gentlemen-farmers and left-handed peasant relations, but of an almost equally fantastic and ill-assorted company of ex-priests, naturalists, journalists, Saint-Simonians, riders of every conceivable religious, political and literary hobby, among whom the successive tutors of the adored Maurice—forming in themselves a line as long as the kings in Macbeth!—perhaps take the palm for oddness of origin and adaptability of manners.

One expected the scene of these confused and incessant comings and goings to wear the injured déclassé air of a house which has never had its rights respected—a house long accustomed to jangle its dinner-bell in vain and swing its broken [ 46 ]