“If that they will go ‘so,’ I will be amused.”  He presented a top-like triangular appearance for one staggering second.  The Tinleys did not go `so’ at all, and consequently they lost the satirical man, and were called ‘the ballet-dancers’ by Adela which thorny scoff her sisters permitted to pass about for a single day, and no more.  The Tinleys were their match at epithets, and any low contention of this kind obscured for them the social summit they hoped to attain; the dream whereof was their prime nourishment.

That the Tinleys really were their match, they acknowledged, upon the admission of the despicable nature of the game.  The Tinleys had winged a dreadful shaft at them; not in itself to be dreaded, but that it struck a weak point; it was a common shot that exploded a magazine; and for a time it quite upset their social policy, causing them to act like simple young ladies who feel things and resent them.  The ladies of Brookfield had let it be known that, in their privacy together, they were Pole, Polar, and North Pole.  Pole, Polar, and North Pole were designations of the three shades of distance which they could convey in a bow:  a form of salute they cherished as peculiarly their own; being a method they had invented to rebuke the intrusiveness of the outer world, and hold away all strangers until approved worthy.  Even friends had occasionally to submit to it in a softened form.  Arabella, the eldest, and Adela, the youngest, alternated Pole and Polar; but North Pole was shared by Cornelia with none.  She was the fairest of the three; a nobly-built person; her eyes not vacant of tenderness when she put off her armour.  In her war-panoply before unhappy strangers, she was a Britomart.  They bowed to an iceberg, which replied to them with the freezing indifference of the floating colossus, when the Winter sun despatches a feeble greeting messenger-beam from his miserable Arctic wallet.  The simile must be accepted in its might, for no lesser one will express the scornfulness toward men displayed by this strikingly well-favoured, formal lady, whose heart of hearts demanded for her as spouse, a lord, a philosopher, and a Christian, in one:  and he must be a member of Parliament.  Hence her isolated air.

Now, when the ladies of Brookfield heard that their Pole, Polar, and North Pole, the splendid image of themselves, had been transformed by the Tinleys, and defiled by them to Pole, Polony, and Maypole, they should have laughed contemptuously; but the terrible nerve of ridicule quivered in witness against them, and was not to be stilled.  They could not understand why so coarse a thing should affect them.  It stuck in their flesh.  It gave them the idea that they saw their features hideous, but real, in a magnifying mirror.