y language
that she was a bit of a sham, perhaps, but then all girls were shams
more or less, and if you kept her off high falutin', she was a decent
sort, and always ready to do a fellow a good turn.

It was sad to note that even when speaking of his favourite sister,
Gurth should have felt it necessary to adopt this tone of patronage, but
even the stoutest champion of girls cannot but admit that the sense of
honour is in them less developed than in boys, and that in moments of
irritation they betray a petty spite, of which the more brutal male is
incapable. Gurth was conscious that he had faults of his own, but he
regarded them leniently as being on an altogether different level from
those of his sisters. He was a bit of a slacker, perhaps, but most
"men" were slackers, and yet pulled through all right by means of a
spurt at the end. His chiefs called him obstinate, but a fellow had to
know his own mind if he were to get on in the world, and he jolly well
knew that he was right as often as not Masters were awful muffs. On the
other hand, he hated gush like poison, and was invariably a hundred
times better than his word, whereas Dreda could hold forth as eloquently
as a parson, with the tears pouring down her cheeks, and her figure
trembling with emotion, and the next day forget the very cause of her
emotion! The girl was like a fire of shavings, quickly lighted, quickly
extinguished, and probably the greatest punishment which she could have
sustained would have been compelled to carry on one of her many
philanthropic schemes to a deliberate conclusion.

They were all stored up in the family archives--the histories of Dreda's
charitable enterprises! The factory girl to whom she was going to write
regularly every week, and whose address was lost in a fortnight--the
collecting cards beyond number, for which, in the first ardour of
possession, subscriptions were extorted from every member of the
household, and which were rescued from stray hiding-places at the last
possible moment and despatched with odd offerings of twopences and
threepences from "A Friend" scribbled in, to fill up the empty spaces.
Everyone understood that the "friend" was Dreda herself, and that she
might be expected to be correspondingly short in tuck money for some
time to come! Never a society did Dreda hear of but she panted to
become a member on the spot, and never a society but received her
resignation, accompanied by a goodly sum in fine