hat
tribute and obedience were paid by every one around them, including
their own womenfolk.

She looked at her two young sisters. They were happy enough in their
free and healthy childhood; so had she been at their age, when the
spacious house and the big gardens, the stables and the farm and the
open country had provided everything she needed for her amusement. But
even then there had been the irksome restraint exercised by "the old
starling" and the fixed rules of the house to spoil her freedom, while
her brothers had been away at Eton, or at Oxford or Cambridge, trying
their wings and preparing for the unfettered delights of well-endowed
manhood.

She looked at her mother, placid and motionless. Her mother was
something of an enigma, even to her, for to those who knew her well she
always seemed to be hiding something, something in her character, which
yet made its mark in spite of the subjection in which she lived. Cicely
loved her mother, but she thought of her now with the least little shade
of contempt, which she would have been shocked to recognise as such. Why
had she been content to bring all the hopes and ambitions that must have
stirred her girlhood thus into subjection? What was the range of her
life now? Ruling her large house with a single eye to the convenience of
her lord and master, liable to be scolded before her children or her
household if anything went wrong; blamed if the faults of any one of the
small army of servants reached the point at which it disturbed his ease;
driving out in her fine carriage to pay dull calls on dull neighbours;
looking after the comfort of ungrateful villagers; going to church;
going to dinner-parties; reading; sewing; gardening under pain of the
head gardener's displeasure, which was always backed up by the Squire if
complaint was brought to him that she had braved it; getting up in the
morning and going to bed at night, at stated hours without variation;
never leaving her cage of confined luxury, except when it suited his
convenience that she should leave it with him. She was nothing but a
slave to his whims and prejudices, and so were all the women of the
family, slaves to wait upon and defer humbly and obediently to their
mankind.

"Is not the life more than meat and the body than raiment?" It was the
men who enjoyed the life, and the meat and raiment as well. While the
women vegetated at home, they went out into the world. It was true that
they were always pleas