s, their rudimentary Latin and
Greek--if anybody is going in for the higher education of women--their
pets, their games of lawn-tennis, their girl companions with whom these
other girls are for ever making appointments to walk, to practise
part-singing, to work or read together, to get up drawing-room
_tableaux_ or plays.

The general consciousness is not, in certain lights, favourable to a
lover's pretensions. For human nature is perverse, and there is such a
thing as _esprit-de-corps_ running to excess. There may be a due amount
of girlish pride in knowing that one of the sisters has inspired a
grand passion. There may be a tremulous respect for the fact that she
has passed the Rubicon, that, in place of girlish trifling, she has an
affair which has to do with the happiness or misery of a fellow
creature, not to say with her own happiness or misery, on her burdened
mind. Why, if she does not take care, she may be plunged at once, first
into the whirl of choosing her trousseau and the fascinating trial of
being the principal figure at a wedding, and then involved in the
tremendous responsibilities of housekeeping, butchers' bills, grocers'
bills, cooks' delinquencies, with the heavy obligations--not only of
ordering dinners for two, but of occasionally entertaining a room full
of company, single-handed!

And this is only one side of the shield; there is a reverse side, at
least equally prominent and alarming. The second side upholds maidenly
claims, finds nothing good enough to match with them, and is tempted to
scout and flout, laugh and mock at the rival claims of the lover upon
trial. This is true even in the most innocent of dove-cots, where satire
is still as playful and harmless as summer lightning.

"The idea of Tom Robinson's thinking of one of us!" cried Annie Millar.
"What could possess him to imagine that we should ever get over the
shop--granted that it is a Brobdingnagian shop, an imposing mart of
linen-drapery, haberdashery, silk-mercery enough to serve the whole
county?"

"To be sure it is only Dora, not you, Annie," burst in eighteen years'
old Rose, who had just left school, and was fain to drop the pretence of
being too young to notice the most interesting event in the world to a
family of girls.

"Why do you say that, Rose? Dora may not be so pretty as Annie--I don't
know, and I don't care--it is all a matter of taste; but she is as much
one of us, father's daughter, brought up like the rest of