actically it was obedient, for it had got the habit of supplying her.
Though payment was long in arrear, the arrears were not treated as lost
ones by Mrs. Fleming, who, without knowing it, possessed one main
secret for mastering the custodians of credit. She had a considerate
remembrance and regard for the most distant of her debts, so that she
seemed to be only always a little late, and exceptionally wrongheaded
in theory. Wrexby, therefore, acquiesced in helping to build up her
children to stoutness, and but for the blindness of all people, save
artists, poets, novelists, to the grandeur of their own creations, the
inhabitants of this Kentish village might have had an enjoyable pride
in the beauty and robust grace of the young girls,--fair-haired,
black-haired girls, a kindred contrast, like fire and smoke, to look
upon. In stature, in bearing, and in expression, they were, if I may
adopt the eloquent modern manner of eulogy, strikingly above their
class. They carried erect shoulders, like creatures not ashamed of
showing a merely animal pride, which is never quite apart from the pride
of developed beauty. They were as upright as Oriental girls, whose heads
are nobly poised from carrying the pitcher to the well. Dark Rhoda might
have passed for Rachel, and Dahlia called her Rachel. They tossed one
another their mutual compliments, drawn from the chief book of their
reading. Queen of Sheba was Dahlia's title. No master of callisthenics
could have set them up better than their mother's receipt for making
good blood, combined with a certain harmony of their systems, had done;
nor could a schoolmistress have taught them correcter speaking. The
characteristic of girls having a disposition to rise, is to be cravingly
mimetic; and they remembered, and crooned over, till by degrees they
adopted the phrases and manner of speech of highly grammatical
people, such as the rector and his lady, and of people in story-books,
especially of the courtly French fairy-books, wherein the princes talk
in periods as sweetly rounded as are their silken calves; nothing less
than angelically, so as to be a model to ordinary men.

The idea of love upon the lips of ordinary men, provoked Dahlia's irony;
and the youths of Wrexby and Fenhurst had no chance against her secret
Prince Florizels. Them she endowed with no pastoral qualities; on the
contrary, she conceived that such pure young gentlemen were only to
be seen, and perhaps met, in the great