harmony of their
systems, had done; nor could a schoolmistress have taught them correcter
speaking. The characteristic of girls having a disposition to rise, is to
be cravingly mimetic; and they remembered, and crooned over, till by
degrees they adopted the phrases and manner of speech of highly
grammatical people, such as the rector and his lady, and of people in
story-books, especially of the courtly French fairy-books, wherein the
princes talk in periods as sweetly rounded as are their silken calves;
nothing less than angelically, so as to be a model to ordinary men.

The idea of love upon the lips of ordinary men, provoked Dahlia's irony;
and the youths of Wrexby and Fenhurst had no chance against her secret
Prince Florizels. Them she endowed with no pastoral qualities; on the
contrary, she conceived that such pure young gentlemen were only to be
seen, and perhaps met, in the great and mystic City of London. Naturally,
the girls dreamed of London. To educate themselves, they copied out whole
pages of a book called the `Field of Mars,' which was next to the family
Bible in size among the volumes of the farmer's small library. The deeds
of the heroes of this book, and the talk of the fairy princes, were
assimilated in their minds; and as they looked around them upon millers',
farmers', maltsters', and tradesmen's sons, the thought of what manner of
youth would propose to marry them became a precocious tribulation. Rhoda,
at the age of fifteen, was distracted by it, owing to her sister's habit
of masking her own dismal internal forebodings on the subject, under the
guise of a settled anxiety concerning her sad chance.

In dress, the wife of the rector of Wrexby was their model. There came
once to Squire Blancove's unoccupied pew a dazzling vision of a fair
lady. They heard that she was a cousin of his third wife, and a widow,
Mrs. Lovell by name. They looked at her all through the service, and the
lady certainly looked at them in return; nor could they, with any
distinctness, imagine why, but the look dwelt long in their hearts, and
often afterward, when Dahlia, upon taking her seat in church, shut her
eyes, according to custom, she strove to conjure up the image of herself,
as she had appeared to the beautiful woman in the dress of grey-shot
silk, with violet mantle and green bonnet, rose-trimmed; and the picture
she conceived was the one she knew herself by, for many ensuing years.

Mrs. Fleming fought her battle wi