She praised their architecture.

Madeline--whom her sisters addressed affectionately as "Mad"--professed
a wider intellectual scope; less given to the melting mood than
Barbara, less naive in her enthusiasms, she took for her province
aesthetic criticism in its totality, and shone rather in censure than
in laudation. French she read passably; German she had talked so much
of studying that it was her belief she had acquired it; Greek and Latin
were beyond her scope, but from modern essayists who wrote in the
flamboyant style she had gathered enough knowledge of these literatures
to be able to discourse of them with a very fluent inaccuracy. With all
schools of painting she was, of course, quite familiar; the great
masters--vulgarly so known--interested her but moderately, and to
praise them was, in her eyes, to incur a suspicion of philistinism.
From her preceptors in this sphere, she had learnt certain names, old
and new, which stood for more exquisite virtues, and the frequent
mention of them with a happy vagueness made her conversation very
impressive to the generality of people. The same in music. It goes
without saying that Madeline was an indifferentist in politics and on
social questions; at the introduction of such topics, she smiled.

Zillah's position was one of more difficulty. With nothing of her
sisters' superficial cleverness, with a mind that worked slowly, and a
memory irretentive, she had a genuine desire to instruct herself, and
that in a solid way. She alone studied with real persistence, and, by
the irony of fate, she alone continually exposed her ignorance,
committed gross blunders, was guilty of deplorable lapses of memory.
Her unhappy lot kept her in a constant state of nervousness and shame.
She had no worldly tact, no command of her modest resources, yet her
zeal to support the credit of the family was always driving her into
hurried speech, sure to end in some disastrous pitfall. Conscious of
aesthetic defects, Zillah had chosen for her speciality the study of
the history of civilization. But for being a Denyer, she might have
been content to say that she studied history, and in that case her life
might also have been solaced by the companionship of readable books;
but, as modernism would have it, she could not be content to base her
historical inquiries on anything less than strata of geology and
biological elements, with the result that she toiled day by day at
perky little primers and compen