on subjects disputable in their own sect had
been imposed on each. Both had the same "views" on all matters religious
and social, and both of them confessed that on many points their "views"
were "strict"--whatever that singular phrase may have meant.
Nevertheless, they displayed remarkable tact in reconciling parents with
the defects and peculiarities of their children. There were always girls
in the school of varying degrees of intelligence, from absolute stupidity
to brilliancy, but the report at the end of the term was so fashioned
that the father and mother of the idiot were not offended, and the idiocy
was so handled that it appeared to have some advantages. If Miss Carter
had been altogether unable to master the French verbs, or to draw the
model vase until the teacher had put in nearly the whole of the outline,
there was a most happy counterpoise, as a rule, in her moral conduct. In
these days of effusive expression, when everybody thinks it his duty to
deliver himself of everything in him--doubts, fears, passions--no matter
whether he does harm thereby or good, the Misses Ponsonby would be
considered intolerably dull and limited. They did not walk about without
their clothes--figuratively speaking--it was not then the fashion. They
were, on the contrary, heavily draped from head to foot, but underneath
the whalebone and padding, strange to say, were real live women's hearts.
They knew what it was to hope and despair; they knew what it was to
reflect that with each of them life might and ought to have been
different; they even knew what it was sometimes to envy the beggar-women
on the doorstep of the Limes who asked for a penny and clasped a child to
her breast. We mistake our ancestors who read Pope and the _Spectator_.
They were very much like ourselves essentially, but they did not believe
that there was nothing in us which should be smothered or strangled.
Perhaps some day we shall go back to them, and find that the "Rape of the
Lock" is better worth reading and really more helpful than magazine
metaphysics. Anyhow, it is certain that the training which the Misses
Ponsonby had received, although it may have made them starched, prim, and
even uninteresting, had an effect upon their character not altogether
unwholesome, and prevented any public crying for the moon, or any public
charge of injustice against its Maker because it is unattainable.

The number of girls was limited to thirty. The house was t