in theory.  Wrexby, therefore, acquiesced in helping to build up her children to stoutness, and but for the blindness of all people, save artists, poets, novelists, to the grandeur of their own creations, the inhabitants of this Kentish village might have had an enjoyable pride in the beauty and robust grace of the young girls,—­fair-haired, black-haired girls, a kindred contrast, like fire and smoke, to look upon.  In stature, in bearing, and in expression, they were, if I may adopt the eloquent modern manner of eulogy, strikingly above their class.  They carried erect shoulders, like creatures not ashamed of showing a merely animal pride, which is never quite apart from the pride of developed beauty.  They were as upright as Oriental girls, whose heads are nobly poised from carrying the pitcher to the well.  Dark Rhoda might have passed for Rachel, and Dahlia called her Rachel.  They tossed one another their mutual compliments, drawn from the chief book of their reading.  Queen of Sheba was Dahlia’s title.  No master of callisthenics could have set them up better than their mother’s receipt for making good blood, combined with a certain harmony of their systems, had done; nor could a schoolmistress have taught them correcter speaking.  The characteristic of girls having a disposition to rise, is to be cravingly mimetic; and they remembered, and crooned over, till by degrees they adopted the phrases and manner of speech of highly grammatical people, such as the rector and his lady, and of people in story-books, especially of the courtly French fairy-books, wherein the princes talk in periods as sweetly rounded as are their silken calves; nothing less than angelically, so as to be a model to ordinary men.

The idea of love upon the lips of ordinary men, provoked Dahlia’s irony; and the youths of Wrexby and Fenhurst had no chance against her secret Prince Florizels.  Them she endowed with no pastoral qualities; on the contrary, she conceived that such pure young gentlemen were only to be seen, and perhaps met, in the great and mystic City of London.  Naturally, the girls dreamed of London.  To educate themselves, they copied out whole pages of a book called the `Field of Mars,’ which was next to the family Bible in size among the volumes of the farmer’s small library.  The deeds of the heroes of this book, and the talk of the fairy princes, were assimilated in their minds; and as they looked around them upon millers’, farmers’, maltsters’, and tradesmen’s sons, the thought of what manner of youth would propose to marry them became a precocious tribulation.  Rhoda, at the age of fifteen, was distracted by it, owing to her sister’s habit of masking her own dismal internal forebodings on the subject, under the guise of a settled anxiety concerning her sad chance.