more showy style of cap than she could prevail on her daughter Mary to
make up for her.

But I have been describing Miss Rebecca as she was in former days only,
for her appearance this evening, as she sits pasting on the green
tickets, is in striking contrast with what it was three or four months
ago. Her plain grey gingham dress and plain white collar could never have
belonged to her ward-robe before that date; and though she is not reduced
in size, and her brown hair will do nothing but hang in crisp ringlets
down her large cheeks, there is a change in her air and expression which
seems to shed a softened light over her person, and make her look like a
peony in the shade, instead of the same flower flaunting in a parterre in
the hot sunlight.

No one could deny that Evangelicalism had wrought a change for the better
in Rebecca Linnet's person--not even Miss Pratt, the thin stiff lady in
spectacles, seated opposite to her, who always had a peculiar repulsion
for 'females with a gross habit of body'. Miss Pratt was an old maid; but
that is a no more definite description than if I had said she was in the
autumn of life. Was it autumn when the orchards are fragrant with apples,
or autumn when the oaks are brown, or autumn when the last yellow leaves
are fluttering in the chill breeze? The young ladies in Milby would have
told you that the Miss Linnets were old maids; but the Miss Linnets were
to Miss Pratt what the apple-scented September is to the bare, nipping
days of late November. The Miss Linnets were in that temperate zone of
old-maidism, when a woman will not say but that if a man of suitable
years and character were to offer himself, she might be induced to tread
the remainder of life's vale in company with him; Miss Pratt was in that
arctic region where a woman is confident that at no time of life would
she have consented to give up her liberty, and that she has never seen
the man whom she would engage to honour and obey. If the Miss Linnets
were old maids, they were old maids with natural ringlets and embonpoint,
not to say obesity; Miss Pratt was an old maid with a cap, a braided
'front', a backbone and appendages. Miss Pratt was the one blue-stocking
of Milby, possessing, she said, no less than five hundred volumes,
competent, as her brother the doctor often observed, to conduct a
conversation on any topic whatever, and occasionally dabbling a little in
authorship, though it was understood that she had never