Read it through once

During the year Dr. Mitford developed a most curious and inexplicable dislike to his daughter’s friends and acquaintances. Possibly he was growing tired of the congratulatory callers, but even so, he must surely have recognized that this sort of thing was the penalty exacted of popularity. “My father,” she wrote to William Harness, “very kind to me in many respects, very attentive if I’m ill, very solicitous that my garden should be nicely kept, that I should go out with him, and be amused—is yet, so far as art, literature, and the drama are concerned, of a temper infinitely difficult to deal with. He hates and despises them, and all their professors—looks on them with hatred and with scorn; and is constantly taunting me with my ‘friends’ and my ‘people’ (as he calls them), reproaching me if I hold the slightest intercourse with author, editor, artist, or actor, and treating with frank contempt every one not of a station in the county. I am entirely convinced that he would consider Sir Thomas Lawrence, Sir Walter Scott, and Mrs. Siddons as his inferiors. Always this is very painful—strangely painful.