e parlors with no furniture that a broker would
have cared to cheapen except the prints and piano, there was space and
apparatus for a wide-glancing, nicely-select life, opened to the
highest things in music, painting and poetry. I am not sure that in the
times of greatest scarcity, before Kate could get paid-work, these
ladies had always had a servant to light their fires and sweep their
rooms; yet they were fastidious in some points, and could not believe
that the manners of ladies in the fashionable world were so full of
coarse selfishness, petty quarreling, and slang as they are represented
to be in what are called literary photographs. The Meyricks had their
little oddities, streaks of eccentricity from the mother's blood as
well as the father's, their minds being like mediaeval houses with
unexpected recesses and openings from this into that, flights of steps
and sudden outlooks.

But mother and daughters were all united by a triple bond--family love;
admiration for the finest work, the best action; and habitual industry.
Hans' desire to spend some of his money in making their lives more
luxurious had been resisted by all of them, and both they and he had
been thus saved from regrets at the threatened triumphs of his yearning
for art over the attractions of secured income--a triumph that would
by-and-by oblige him to give up his fellowship. They could all afford
to laugh at his Gavarni-caricatures and to hold him blameless in
following a natural bent which their unselfishness and independence had
left without obstacle. It was enough for them to go on in their old
way, only having a grand treat of opera-going (to the gallery) when
Hans came home on a visit.

Seeing the group they made this evening, one could hardly wish them to
change their way of life. They were all alike small, and so in due
proportion to their miniature rooms. Mrs. Meyrick was reading aloud
from a French book; she was a lively little woman, half French, half
Scotch, with a pretty articulateness of speech that seemed to make
daylight in her hearer's understanding. Though she was not yet fifty,
her rippling hair, covered by a quakerish net cap, was chiefly gray,
but her eyebrows were brown as the bright eyes below them; her black
dress, almost like a priest's cassock with its rows of buttons, suited
a neat figure hardly five feet high. The daughters were to match the
mother, except that Mab had Hans' light hair and complexion, with a
bossy, irre