abella, the eldest, and Adela,
the youngest, alternated Pole and Polar; but North Pole was shared by
Cornelia with none. She was the fairest of the three; a nobly-built
person; her eyes not vacant of tenderness when she put off her armour.
In her war-panoply before unhappy strangers, she was a Britomart.
They bowed to an iceberg, which replied to them with the freezing
indifference of the floating colossus, when the Winter sun despatches
a feeble greeting messenger-beam from his miserable Arctic wallet. The
simile must be accepted in its might, for no lesser one will express
the scornfulness toward men displayed by this strikingly well-favoured,
formal lady, whose heart of hearts demanded for her as spouse, a lord,
a philosopher, and a Christian, in one: and he must be a member of
Parliament. Hence her isolated air.

Now, when the ladies of Brookfield heard that their Pole, Polar, and
North Pole, the splendid image of themselves, had been transformed by
the Tinleys, and defiled by them to Pole, Polony, and Maypole, they
should have laughed contemptuously; but the terrible nerve of ridicule
quivered in witness against them, and was not to be stilled. They could
not understand why so coarse a thing should affect them. It stuck in
their flesh. It gave them the idea that they saw their features hideous,
but real, in a magnifying mirror.

There was therefore a feud between the Tinleys and the Poles; and when
Mr. Pericles entirely gave up the former, the latter rewarded him by
spreading abroad every possible kind interpretation of his atrocious bad
manners. He was a Greek, of Parisian gilding, whose Parisian hat flew
off at a moment's notice, and whose savage snarl was heard at the
slightest vexation. His talk of renowned prime-donne by their Christian
names, and the way that he would catalogue emperors, statesmen, and
noblemen known to him, with familiar indifference, as things below the
musical Art, gave a distinguishing tone to Brookfield, from which his
French accentuation of our tongue did not detract.

Mr. Pericles grimaced bitterly at any claim to excellence being set up
for the mysterious voice in the woods. Tapping one forefinger on the
uplifted point of the other, he observed that to sing abroad in the
night air of an English Spring month was conclusive of imbecility; and
that no imbecile sang at all. Because, to sing, involved the highest
accomplishment of which the human spirit could boast. Did the ladies
see?