and not by the blindness or stupidity of the outer world.  Thus, in one direction, an ideal precludes humbug.  The ladies might desire to cloak facts, but they had no pleasure in deception.  They had the feminine power of extinguishing things disagreeable, so long as nature or the fates did them no violence.  When these forces sent an emissary to confound them, as was clearly the case with Mrs. Chump, they fought.  The dreadful creature insisted upon shows of maudlin affection that could not be accorded to her, so that she existed in a condition of preternatural sensitiveness.  Among ladies pretending to dignity of life, the horror of acrid complaints alternating with public offers of love from a gross woman, may be pictured in the mind’s eye.  The absence of Mr. Pole and Wilfrid, which caused Mrs. Chump to chafe at the restraint imposed by the presence of males to whom she might not speak endearingly, and deprived the ladies of proper counsel, and what good may be at times in masculine authority, led to one fierce battle, wherein the great shot was fired on both sides.  Mrs. Chump was requested to leave the house:  she declined.  Interrogated as to whether she remained as an enemy, knowing herself to be so looked upon, she said that she remained to save them from the dangers they invited.  Those dangers she named, observing that Mrs. Lupin, their aunt, might know them, but was as liable to be sent to sleep by a fellow with a bag of jokes as a watchdog to be quieted by a bone.  The allusion here was to Mrs. Lupin’s painful, partially inexcusable, incurable sense of humour, especially when a gleam of it led to the prohibited passages of life.  The poor lady was afflicted so keenly that, in instances where one of her sex and position in the social scale is bound to perish rather than let even the shadow of a laugh appear, or any sign of fleshly perception or sympathy peep out, she was seen to be mutely, shockingly, penitentially convulsed:  a degrading sight.  And albeit repeatedly remonstrated with, she, upon such occasions, invariably turned imploring glances—­a sort of frowning entreaty—­to the ladies, or to any of her sex present.  “Did you not see that?  Oh! can you resist it?” she seemed to gasp, as she made those fruitless efforts to drag them to her conscious level.  “Sink thou, if thou wilt,” was the phrase indicated to her.  She had once thought her propensity innocent enough, and enjoyable.  Her nieces had almost cured her, by sitting on her, until Mrs. Chump came to make her worst than ever.  It is to be feared that Mrs. Chump was beginning to abuse her power over the little colourless lady.  We cannot, when we find ourselves possessed of the gift of sending a creature into convulsions, avoid exercising it.  Mrs. Lupin was one of the victims of the modern feminine ‘ideal.’  She was in mind merely a woman; devout and charitable, as her nieces admitted; but radically—­what?  They did not like to think, or to say, what;—­repugnant, seemed