It came to be tacitly, or at
least passively, conceded by the other ladies that she had somehow
earned the exclusive right to what had once been the common charge; or
that if one of their number had a claim to keep Mr. Alford from killing
himself by all sorts of imprudences, which in his case amounted to
impieties, it was certainly Mrs. Yarrow. They did not put this in terms,
but they felt it and acted it.
She was all the safer guardian for a delicate invalid because she
loathed manly sports so entirely that she did not even pretend to like
them, as most women, poor things, think themselves obliged to do. In her
hands there was no danger that he would be tempted to excesses in golf.
She was really afraid of all boats, but she was willing to go out with
him in the sail-boat of a superannuated skipper, because to sit talking
in the stern and stoop for the vagaries of the boom in tacking was such
good exercise. She would join him in fishing from the rotting pier, but
with no certainty which was a cunner and which was a sculpin, when she
caught it, and with an equal horror of both the nasty, wriggling things.
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