hey were
re-echoed to him the next minute, in the prettiest shape, and with the
most delicate articulation, from lips which (like those in the fairy
tale) never opened without dropping pearls and diamonds.

Oh, what a contrast, in the eyes of a man whose sense of beauty and
grace, whether physical or intellectual, was true and deep, to
that ghastly ring of prophetesses in the Hatchgoose drawing-room;
strong-minded and emancipated women, who prided themselves on having
cast off conventionalities, and on being rude, and awkward, and
dogmatic, and irreverent, and sometimes slightly improper; women
who had missions to mend everything in heaven and earth, except
themselves; who had quarrelled with their husbands, and had therefore
felt a mission to assert women's rights, and reform marriage in
general; or who had never been able to get married at all, and
therefore were especially competent to promulgate a model method of
educating the children whom they never had had; women who wrote poetry
about Lady Blanches whom they never had met, and novels about male and
female blackguards whom (one hopes) they never had met, or about whom
(if they had) decent women would have held their peace; and every one
of whom had in obedience to Emerson, "followed her impulses," and
despised fashion, and was accordingly clothed and bedizened as was
right in the sight of her own eyes, and probably in those of no one
else.

No wonder that Elsley, ere long, began drawing comparisons, and using
his wit upon ancient patronesses, of course behind their backs,
likening them to idols fresh from the car of Juggernaut, or from the
stern of a South Sea canoe; or, most of all, to that famous
wooden image of Freya, which once leapt lumbering forth from her
bullock-cart, creaking and rattling in every oaken joint, to belabour
the too daring Viking who was flirting with her priestess. Even so,
whispered Elsley, did those brains and tongues creak and rattle,
lumbering before the blasts of Pythonic inspiration; and so, he verily
believed, would the awkward arms and legs have done likewise, if one
of the Pythonesses had ever so far degraded herself as to dance.

No wonder, then, that those gifted dames had soon to complain
of Elsley Vavasour as a traitor to the cause of progress and
civilisation; a renegade who had fled to the camp of aristocracy,
flunkeydom, obscurantism, frivolity, and dissipation; though there was
not one of them but would have given an e