For she had come down to find the whole neighborhood in a ferment, and many pleasant illusions, in the shelter of which she had walked for years, both before and since her husband’s death, questioned, at least, and cracking, if not shattered. That the Corystons were model landlords, that they enjoyed a feudal popularity among their tenants and laborers, was for Lady Coryston one of the axioms on which life was based. She despised people who starved their estates, let their repairs go, and squeezed the last farthing out of their tenants. Nor had she any sympathy with people who owned insanitary cottages. It had been her fond belief that she at least possessed none.