ickly, 'the charm of womanhood
consists in its mysteriousness. Now, the girl of to-day is simply a
good fellow. She doesn't require to be understood, and she doesn't
drive men crazy; she shoves her own bicycle up hills and fights for the
larger half of the keyboard of the piano.' She sighed again.

'She is a moral influence,' said Mrs. Wrottesley. Mrs. Wrottesley also
alluded to the girl of the period; and Miss Abingdon thought that to
refer to her as 'she' or a type, instead of 'they,' had a flavour of
culture about it, but she did not mean to give in.

'Yes, yes,' she said impatiently, her love of contradicting Mrs.
Wrottesley and at the same time holding her own in the discussion
inclining her to undue severity, 'she is as straight as any other good
fellow, and she pays up if she has lost at bridge, and would as soon
think of picking a pocket as of cheating at croquet; but she is not
mysterious--she is absolutely comprehensible.'

'Probably,' said Mrs. Wrottesley, 'Jane's shortcomings in this respect
are due to the fact that she is lamentably unaffected. Affectation, in
the case of girls who ride straight and don't know what it is to have a
headache, very often takes the form of boyishness. Let us console
ourselves with the fact that, being perfectly natural, Jane has escaped
masculinity.'

'Jane is a lady,' said Miss Abingdon severely, and with the faint
suggestion of administering a snub. 'But,' she added, with that touch
of superiority in her manner which obtruded itself in most of her
conversation with the vicar's wife, 'there are certain accepted
traditions of womanhood such as conventionality approves, and it was
not called artificial to conform to them when I was a girl.'

'I remember,' said Mrs. Wrottesley, 'that we honestly thought that we
were interesting when we ate very little, and I myself often used to
aspire to an attractive display of timidity when inwardly I had no
sensation of fear.'

As the wife of the vicar of the parish Mrs. Wrottesley wore brown
merino and a mantle, but these hid a great soul securely held in check
and narrowed down by a strict adherence to the small conventions and
paralysing rules which society seems to have prescribed for vicars and
their wives in the rural parishes of England. She prayed every morning
of her life for more faith, and meant by that a narrower creed. Mrs.
Wrottesley was an inarticulate woman, and had gained for herself the
character of being res