The Great Miss Driver by Antonio Hope

Jenny had come back with her courage unbroken -- and with her ambitions unappeased, though it seemed that their direction had been in some measure changed. Somehow Margaret Octon was now one of their principal objects. It was not possible just now to see further into her mind, even at a tolerably close view -- a much closer one than her neighbors were permitted to enjoy. It was even an appreciable time before Catsford heard of Margaret Octon at all. The presence of the girl was not obtruded, much less her name; nothing was said of her in the paragraph that went to the paper. Jenny left Catsford to digest the fact of her own return first.

It was enough to occupy the neighborhood's digestive faculties for many days. It raised such various questions, on which different minds settled with differing degrees of avidity. Questions of morality, of propriety, of conventionality on the one hand -- questions of charity, of policy, of self-interest on the other. There were the party of principle and the party of expediency, cutting across the lines of the party of propriety and the party of charity. Some quoted Caesar's wife -- when do they not? Others maintained that an Englishman was innocent till he was proved guilty -- and _a fortiori_ a handsome, attractive, interesting, and remarkably rich Englishwoman. It was contended by one faction that a self-banishment of nearly three years was apology enough -- if apology were needed; by the other that Jenny had insolently spurned any effort to "put herself right" with public opinion. To add to the complication, people shifted their attitudes from day to day -- either under influence, as when they had been talked to by Mrs. Jepps or by Mr. Bindlecombe as the case might be, or from the sheer pleasure of discussing the matter over again from another point of view, and drawing out their neighbors by advocating what, twenty-four hours earlier, they had condemned.