The maiden ladies Dorothea and Virginia Duvidney were thin—­sweet old-fashioned grey gentlewomen, demurely conscious of their excellence and awake to the temptation in the consciousness, who imposed a certain reflex primness on the lips of the world when addressing them or when alluding to them.  For their appearance was picturesque of the ancestral time, and their ideas and scrupulousness of delivery suggested the belated in ripeness; orchard apples under a snow-storm; or any image that will ceremoniously convey the mind’s profound appreciation together with the tooth’s panic dread of tartness.  They were by no means tart; only, as you know, the tooth is apprehensively nervous; an uninviting sign will set it on edge.  Even the pen which would sketch them has a spell on it and must don its coat of office, walk the liveried footman behind them.

Their wealth, their deeds of charity, their modesty, their built grey locks, their high repute; a ‘Chippendale elegance’ in a quaintly formal correctness, that they had, as Colney Durance called it; gave them some queenliness, and allowed them to claim the ear as an oracle and banish rebellious argument.  Intuitive knowledge, assisted by the Rev. Stuart Rem and the Rev. Abram Posterley, enabled them to pronounce upon men and things; not without effect; their country owned it; the foreigner beheld it.  Nor were they corrupted by the servility of the surrounding ear.  They were good women, striving to be humbly good.  They might, for all the little errors they nightly unrolled to then perceptions, have stood before the world for a study in the white of our humanity.  And this may be but a washed wall, it is true:  revolutionary sceptics are measuring the depths of it.  But the hue refreshes, the world admires; and we know it an object of aim to the bettermost of the wealthy.  If, happily, complacent circumstances have lifted us to the clean paved platform out of grip of puddled clay and bespattering wheeltracks, we get our chance of coming to it.

Possessing, for example, nine thousand pounds per annum in Consols, and not expending the whole of it upon our luxuries, we are, without further privation, near to kindling the world’s enthusiasm for whiteness.  Yet there, too, we find, that character has its problems to solve; there are shades in salt.  We must be charitable, but we should be just; we give to the poor of the land, but we are eminently the friends of our servants; duty to mankind diverts us not from the love we bear to our dog; and with a pathetic sorrow for silt, we discard it from sight and hearing.  We hate dirt.  Having said so much, having shown it, by sealing the mouth of Mr. Stuart Rem and iceing the veins of Mr. Abram Posterley, in relation to a dreadful public case and a melancholy private, we have a pleased sense of entry into the world’s ideal.

At the same time, we protest our unworthiness.  Acknowledgeing that they were not purely spotless, these ladies genuinely took the tiny fly-spot for a spur to purification; and they viewed it as a patch to raise in relief their goodness.  They gazed on it, saw themselves in it, and veiled it:  warned of the cunning of an oft-defeated Tempter.