The rector was a nice man of about sixty, full of his duty, and reduced, personally, almost to a nonentity by the silent⁠—You leave me alone!⁠—of the village. The miners’ wives were nearly all Methodists. The miners were nothing. But even so much official uniform as the clergyman wore was enough to obscure entirely the fact that he was a man like any other man. No, he was Mester Ashby, a sort of automatic preaching and praying concern.

This stubborn, instinctive⁠—We think ourselves as good as you, if you are Lady Chatterley!⁠—puzzled and baffled Connie at first extremely. The curious, suspicious, false amiability with which the miners’ wives met her overtures; the curiously offensive tinge of⁠—Oh dear me! I am somebody now, with Lady Chatterley talking to me! But she needn’t think I’m not as good as her for all that!⁠—which she always heard twanging in the women’s half-fawning voices, was impossible. There was no getting past it. It was hopelessly and offensively nonconformist.