Madeline—­whom her sisters addressed affectionately as “Mad”—­ professed a wider intellectual scope; less given to the melting mood than Barbara, less naive in her enthusiasms, she took for her province aesthetic criticism in its totality, and shone rather in censure than in laudation.  French she read passably; German she had talked so much of studying that it was her belief she had acquired it; Greek and Latin were beyond her scope, but from modern essayists who wrote in the flamboyant style she had gathered enough knowledge of these literatures to be able to discourse of them with a very fluent inaccuracy.  With all schools of painting she was, of course, quite familiar; the great masters—­vulgarly so known—­interested her but moderately, and to praise them was, in her eyes, to incur a suspicion of philistinism.  From her preceptors in this sphere, she had learnt certain names, old and new, which stood for more exquisite virtues, and the frequent mention of them with a happy vagueness made her conversation very impressive to the generality of people.  The same in music.  It goes without saying that Madeline was an indifferentist in politics and on social questions; at the introduction of such topics, she smiled.

Zillah’s position was one of more difficulty.  With nothing of her sisters’ superficial cleverness, with a mind that worked slowly, and a memory irretentive, she had a genuine desire to instruct herself, and that in a solid way.  She alone studied with real persistence, and, by the irony of fate, she alone continually exposed her ignorance, committed gross blunders, was guilty of deplorable lapses of memory.  Her unhappy lot kept her in a constant state of nervousness and shame.  She had no worldly tact, no command of her modest resources, yet her zeal to support the credit of the family was always driving her into hurried speech, sure to end in some disastrous pitfall.  Conscious of aesthetic defects, Zillah had chosen for her speciality the study of the history of civilization.  But for being a Denyer, she might have been content to say that she studied history, and in that case her life might also have been solaced by the companionship of readable books; but, as modernism would have it, she could not be content to base her historical inquiries on anything less than strata of geology and biological elements, with the result that she toiled day by day at perky little primers and compendia, and only learnt one chapter that it might be driven out of her head by the next.  Equally out of deference to her sisters, she smothered her impulses to conventional piety, and made believe that her spiritual life supported itself on the postulates of science.  As a result of all which, the poor girl was not very happy, but in that again did she not give proof of belonging to her time?