Part 2, Chapter XI.
Oxley Manor.
“Oh, so many, many, many maidens!”
Under the great walnut-tree on the lawn the three Miss Vennings were assembled in consultation. The Manor House possessed one of the most enchanting gardens that the past has ever handed down to the present. High walls shutting it in safe, on winch grew jessamine and wisteria and sweet old-fashioned roses; a narrow path running round the lawn, and leading away into vistas of shrubbery; while on the soft turf grew beautiful trees, and, in especial, an immense walnut. Miss Venning sat on a garden-bench communicating to her sisters the important event that had just electrified her maidenly precincts.
“It was very inconsiderate of Arthur to select our garden-roller for the purpose,” said Miss Clarissa, the second of the trio.
“Why, Clarissa? You don’t suppose people settle the exact spot beforehand!” said Miss Florence, the third.
Miss Florence, as she now aspired to be called, had been little Flossy not many years back; and the thick bright hair of fairest flaxen—“Flossy’s tow,” as her sisters called it—now twisted round her head, had not so very long ago hung down her back in all its native lustre. She was a tall girl of twenty, with a fine open face, handsome in form, and coloured with a pink—“as pink as pink ribbon,” Clarissa said—bright enough to allow for a little fading as the years went by; and her blue eyes were full of thought and energy. Young as she was, everyone knew that she was a much greater power in the house than Miss Clarissa, and was hardly second to Miss Venning herself. All the girls obeyed her; she was full of life and force to the very tips of her strong, slender fingers; could learn better than the girls, teach better than the governesses, thought school-keeping a vocation and not a drudgery, and spent her half-holidays in the parish; was never ill, never tired, and never unhappy; and possessed such a store of spirits and energy that—to quote again from Clarissa—if Flossy was not marked out for misfortune Nature had wasted a great deal of good stuff in the making of her.
Flossy was Miss Venning’s darling, and need never have corrected an exercise nor set a sum if she had not been so minded; but she had replied to the offer of freedom with scorn and contempt: “Did sister think she should be happier for being idle?” and set to work with all her might and main to “enlarge the minds and improve the tone” of her sister’s pupils, introducing new studies, new authors, and new ideas; talking over Miss Venning—or sometimes, perhaps, talking her down—with an equal amount of self-confidence and self-devotion.
In Miss Clarissa’s girlish days no such possibility of freedom had been offered to her. Nine or ten years ago, during the long illness of their mother, and while the brothers who filled up the wide gaps between the three sisters had been yet unsettled in life, the circumstances of the school had required more personal exertion; and when Clarissa was at the end of her teens she had been too busy—teaching all the English, that the resident governess might be French—to consider if it was desirable for the pupils to read Thackeray or to learn Latin and Euclid. Clarissa was a good girl and did her duty; but now, at eight and twenty, she felt as if life might have offered her something more than school-keeping. She told Flossy that she should like to marry a Duke and drink chocolate out of Sèvres china—and the scandalised Flossy perceived neither the twinkle of the sleepy blue eyes nor the wistful fall of the well-curved mouth, the delicate prettiness of which gave to the small curly-haired Clarissa a look of youth which neither the absence of Sèvres china nor the presence of young ladies had hitherto impaired. Flossy’s eyes were always wide open and rarely twinkled, though they often laughed.
They brightened into a laugh now, as she repeated her remark—