Page:Gissing - Workers in the Dawn, vol. I, 1880.djvu/36

26 his cares, or, perhaps I should say, the hot competition among the latter for the possession of the dearly-coveted honour, the position of a parson's wife. Without unnecessary amplitude of description, therefore. I shall content myself with saying that, before Edward Norman had been a year in his cure, the lot had been drawn, and the happy maid had received her prize; nor could the most envious assert that in choosing Helen Burton for his bride, the clergyman had laid himself open to imputations on his taste or his generosity. Helen had long been, undisputedly, the village beauty, but so humble was her social position that not one of the damsels who boasted of their place in the aristocracy of the district had for a moment dreamed of her as a rival. She was nothing more than the daughter of the principal tailor in Bloomford, but her father was a man of the strictest integrity, even of some intellectual pretensions, and universally respected by all who were so unfortunate as to ba tainted with the modern heresy that money does not make the man. Helen had, thanks to this worthy man's care, received an education which would compare very favourably indeed even with that possessed by tho daughters of Sir Bedford Lamb, one of the members for the county, whose seat was only some two miles distant from Bloomford. It was indeed then to the astonishment of all