Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women:  if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude.  Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women’s coiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and verse.  Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind.  Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed.

BOOK I.

Miss Brooke.

——­

CHAPTER I.

    “Since I can do no good because a woman,
     Reach constantly at something that is near it. 
          —­The Maid’s Tragedy:  Beaumont and Fletcher.

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.  Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,—­or from one of our elder poets,—­in a paragraph of to-day’s newspaper.  She was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister Celia had more common-sense.  Nevertheless, Celia wore scarcely more trimmings; and it was only to close observers that her dress differed from her sister’s, and had a shade of coquetry in its arrangements; for Miss Brooke’s plain dressing was due to mixed conditions, in most of which her sister shared.  The pride of being ladies had something to do with it:  the Brooke connections, though not exactly aristocratic, were unquestionably “good:”  if you inquired backward for a generation or two, you would not find any yard-measuring or parcel-tying forefathers—­anything lower than an admiral or a clergyman; and there was even an ancestor discernible as a Puritan gentleman who served under Cromwell, but afterwards conformed, and managed to come out of all political troubles as the proprietor of a respectable family estate.  Young women of such birth, living in a quiet country-house, and attending a village church hardly larger than a parlor, naturally regarded frippery as the ambition of a huckster’s daughter.  Then there was well-bred economy, which in those days made show in