was objected to. She would squander her care on poppies, and she had been
heard to say that, while she lived, her children should be fully fed. The
encouragement of flaunting weeds in a decent garden was indicative of a
moral twist that the expressed resolution to supply her table with
plentiful nourishment, no matter whence it came, or how provided,
sufficiently confirmed. The reason with which she was stated to have
fortified her stern resolve was of the irritating order, right in the
abstract, and utterly unprincipled in the application. She said, `Good
bread, and good beef, and enough of both, make good blood; and my
children shall be stout.' This is such a thing as maybe announced by
foreign princesses and rulers over serfs; but English Wrexby, in
cogitative mood, demanded an equivalent for its beef and divers economies
consumed by the hungry children of the authoritative woman. Practically
it was obedient, for it had got the habit of supplying her. Though
payment was long in arrear, the arrears were not treated as lost ones by
Mrs. Fleming, who, without knowing it, possessed one main secret for
mastering the custodians of credit. She had a considerate remembrance and
regard for the most distant of her debts, so that she seemed to be only
always a little late, and exceptionally wrongheaded in theory. Wrexby,
therefore, acquiesced in helping to build up her children to stoutness,
and but for the blindness of all people, save artists, poets, novelists,
to the grandeur of their own creations, the inhabitants of this Kentish
village might have had an enjoyable pride in the beauty and robust grace
of the young girls,--fair-haired, black-haired girls, a kindred contrast,
like fire and smoke, to look upon. In stature, in bearing, and in
expression, they were, if I may adopt the eloquent modern manner of
eulogy, strikingly above their class. They carried erect shoulders, like
creatures not ashamed of showing a merely animal pride, which is never
quite apart from the pride of developed beauty. They were as upright as
Oriental girls, whose heads are nobly poised from carrying the pitcher to
the well. Dark Rhoda might have passed for Rachel, and Dahlia called her
Rachel. They tossed one another their mutual compliments, drawn from the
chief book of their reading. Queen of Sheba was Dahlia's title. No master
of callisthenics could have set them up better than their mother's
receipt for making good blood, combined with a certain