Some have felt that these blundering lives are due
to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the
Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women:
if there were one level of feminine incompetence as
strict as the ability to count three and no more,
the social lot of women might be treated with scientific
certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains,
and the limits of variation are really much wider
than any one would imagine from the sameness of women’s
coiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and
verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily
among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds
the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed
kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa,
foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and
sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and
are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring
in some long-recognizable deed.
Miss Brooke.
——
“Since I can do no good
because a woman,
Reach constantly at
something that is near it.
—The
Maid’s Tragedy: Beaumont and
Fletcher.
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to
be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand
and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear
sleeves not less bare of style than those in which
the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and
her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed
to gain the more dignity from her plain garments,
which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the
impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,—or
from one of our elder poets,—in a paragraph
of to-day’s newspaper. She was usually
spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the
addition that her sister Celia had more common-sense.
Nevertheless, Celia wore scarcely more trimmings;
and it was only to close observers that her dress
differed from her sister’s, and had a shade
of coquetry in its arrangements; for Miss Brooke’s
plain dressing was due to mixed conditions, in most
of which her sister shared. The pride of being
ladies had something to do with it: the Brooke
connections, though not exactly aristocratic, were
unquestionably “good:” if you inquired
backward for a generation or two, you would not find
any yard-measuring or parcel-tying forefathers—anything
lower than an admiral or a clergyman; and there was
even an ancestor discernible as a Puritan gentleman
who served under Cromwell, but afterwards conformed,
and managed to come out of all political troubles
as the proprietor of a respectable family estate.
Young women of such birth, living in a quiet country-house,
and attending a village church hardly larger than a
parlor, naturally regarded frippery as the ambition
of a huckster’s daughter. Then there was
well-bred economy, which in those days made show in
