She used to say doubtful things about love.  One of them struck my mother with horror.  Miss Leroy told a male person once, and told him to his face, that if she loved him and he loved her, and they agreed to sign one another’s foreheads with a cross as a ceremony, it would be as good to her as marriage.  This may seem a trifle, but nobody now can imagine what was thought of it at the time it was spoken.  My mother repeated it every now and then for fifty years.  It may be conjectured how easily any other girls of our acquaintance would have been classified, and justly classified, if they had uttered such barefaced Continental immorality.  Miss Leroy’s neighbours were remarkably apt at classifying their fellow-creatures.  They had a few, a very few holes, into which they dropped their neighbours, and they must go into one or the other.  Nothing was more distressing than a specimen which, notwithstanding all the violence which might be used to it, would not fit into a hole, but remained an exception.  Some lout, I believe, reckoning on the legitimacy of his generalisation, and having heard of this and other observations accredited to Miss Leroy, ventured to be slightly rude to her.  What she said to him was never known, but he was always shy afterwards of mentioning her name, and when he did he was wont to declare that she was “a rum un.”  She was not particular, I have heard, about personal tidiness, and this I can well believe, for she was certainly not distinguished when I knew her for this virtue.  She cared nothing for the linen-closet, the spotless bed-hangings, and the bright poker, which were the true household gods of the respectable women of those days.  She would have been instantly set down as “slut,” and as having “nasty dirty forrin ways,” if a peculiar habit of hers had not unfortunately presented itself, most irritating to her critics, so anxious promptly to gratify their philosophic tendency towards scientific grouping.  Mrs. Mobbs, who lived next door to her, averred that she always slept with the window open.  Mrs. Mobbs, like everybody else, never opened her window except to “air the room.”  Mrs. Mobbs’ best bedroom was carpeted all over, and contained a great four-post bedstead, hung round with heavy hangings, and protected at the top from draughts by a kind of firmament of white dimity.  Mrs. Mobbs stuffed a sack of straw up the chimney of the fireplace, to prevent the fall of the “sutt,” as she called it.  Mrs. Mobbs, if she had a visitor, gave her a hot supper, and expected her immediately afterwards to go upstairs, draw the window curtains, get into this bed, draw the bed curtains also, and wake up the next morning “bilious.”  This was the proper thing to do.  Miss Leroy’s sitting-room was decidedly disorderly; the chairs were dusty; “yer might write yer name on the table,” Mrs. Mobbs declared; but, nevertheless, the casement was never closed night nor day; and, moreover, Miss Leroy was believed by the strongest circumstantial