Chapter I.
"Virginibus puerisque," said Miss Constantia Demning; "and it's by a man!"
"By a man!" echoed the awe-struck Athanasia.
"And to think that in spite of all our pioneering and efforts to confine her studies to the New Woman Series our niece may even now have tasted of the tree and be bursting out into throbbing nerve-centres and palpable possibilities. Compare we two with her! Have you noted her restless craving after Philistine delights such as man-worship and a literary style? Thank Heaven, she never got that from us or our books."
The speakers were a pair of old Purgatorial Twins, not without alleviations, designed by Nature to multiply. But aloofness, coupled in harness with anæmia, had nipped the wilding shoots in the bud and won hands down at the distance. True, in the scraggy past, there had been a male creature, less curate than Cupid, that each of them had saved her soul alive in the memory of. But the cares of celibacy, cruel-heavy as a portmanteau-metaphor, now weighed on their shoulders; they could not crush them with a burial-spade like complete natures; they stamped their faces (the cares did the twins' faces) with their ponderous crow's feet.
Still, at times, like spring-cleanings, came spring-hankerings. A whiff of yellow tulip on the breeze, and they would drink in the sunlight and the flowers and the beasts and the fishes and the dew and the early worm.
Even now as they peered into this book of forbidden sentiment at the words—"The presence of the two lovers is so enchanting to each other that it seems it must be the best thing possible for everybody else"—from some faded, twilit cellar of the past came the bleating lyre-bird of carnal reverie; but the astuter of the two scented tangibly the cloven hoof, and coming to her better self with a strangled "Oh!" she cast the book into the stove of the Queen Anne parlour, so suggestive of their own aloofness, void as it was of dog or waste-paper basket, or English grammar, or any such humanizing influence.
At that moment a pair of swift, Pagan feet sounded in the passage.