His Grace — page 32: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

26 HIS GRACE. which Nora handed to me :—‘“ Very happy to see your brother, my dear. Sorry I have no lady for him.” — Poor people, and people who have seen better days, are doubtless apt to detect slights when perhaps none have been intended. I confess that I did not like what seemed to me to be a somewhat studied lack of cere- mony on Lady Deverell’s part; but then, for the matter of that, I did not like Lady Deverell; and, after all, it was we, and not she, who had begun by being uncere- monious. At the risk of being suspected of a jealous prejudice against the two people who had done the most good in the parish since our losses had debarred my mother from taking any pecuniary share in works of charity, I will confess that, if we had a neighbor whom [I disliked more than Lady Deverell, it was Mr. Burgess, our re- spected rector; so that I was not overjoyed to find him standing in the well-known drawing-room, with his hands behind his back and his legs wide apart, just as he had been used to stand in the old days when he came to dine with us, and when his manner in addressing us had been so very different. He addressed me now in a tone of kindly patronage, holding out his fat hand, calling me, “ My young friend,” and expressing a nope that I was sticking to work. “‘Work—work! Nothing like work for keeping the body and the mind healthy, you may depend upon it,” he was pleased to say. His body was unquestionably, not to say obtrusively, healthy ; I cannot answer for the state of his mind; but in any case I really did not think, from what I knew of him, that he could have arrived at that pitch of happy certitude through personal experience of the means Eomichooks Ge