stive while
standing upon the border-land that divides the marriageable from the
un-marriageable age; but that boundary once passed, they take place
among the worthiest and best. And surely their anxiety as to the reply
to the question of "Miss or Mrs.?" is pardonable. Matrimony means an
utter change of life to a woman; while to a man it is of infinitely less
import.

I am afraid I cannot class the "Signorina Guiseppina Pace" as having
formed one of the pleasant section of old maids; I must even, however
reluctantly, place her among the decidedly unpleasant ones.
"Peace"--"Pace" was her name, but her old mother, with whom she lived,
would have told you that she differed greatly from her name.

So do most of us, indeed; and I am sure you have only to run over the
list of your friends in the kindliest manner to see that I am right in
my affirmation.

Perhaps Miss Guiseppina thought that one can have too much of even a
good thing; that the name of Pace was quite enough for the house, and
that, in consequence, she ought to do her best to banish it under all
other circumstances. She certainly succeeded; for she led her poor old
widow-mother and their single servant such a life as to give them a
lively foretaste of what Purgatory--to say no worse--might possibly be.

Ah! if she could but have cut off the Pace from her own name as cleanly
as she cut off all possible peace from the two poor women who were
doomed, for their sins, to live under the same roof with her!

But, despite the endeavours during thirty odd long years, she had never
had one single chance of doing so; and it riled her to the core.
Schoolfellows had floated away upon the sea of matrimony, friends had
become mothers--grandmothers--and yet she remained Guiseppina Pace, as
she ever had remained; and with no prospect of a change.

How she learned to loathe the sight of a bridal procession; and how she
taught mother and maid to tremble at the passing of the same! How the
news of a projected marriage stirred her bile, and how her dearest
friends hastened to her with any matrimonial news they could gather, or
invent! It was wonderful to see, and pleasant enough to witness--from a
distance.

Guiseppina and her mother occupied a small flat in Via Santa Teresa:
Guiseppina's bed-room and their one sitting-room looking into the
street; her mother's room, the kitchen and a sort of coal-hole in which
the servant slept being at the back of the house.

It was summ