The neighbourhood abounded with pretty clerical and country homes, where my cousins were intimate; each one, so it seemed to Eleanor and me, prettier than the last: sunshiny and homelike, with irregular comfortable furniture, dainty with chintz, or dark with aged oak, each room more tastefully besprinkled than the rest with old china, new books, music, sketches, needlework, and flowers.
“Do you know, Eleanor,” said I, when we were dressing for dinner one evening before a toilette-table that had been tastefully adorned for our use by the daughters of the house, “I wonder if Yorkshire women are as ‘house-proud’ as they call themselves? I think our villagers are, in the important points of cleanliness and solid comfort, and of course we are at the Vicarage as to that—Keziah keeps us all like copper kettles; but don’t you think we might have a little more house-pride about tasteful pretty refinements? It perhaps is rather a waste of time arranging all these vases and baskets of flowers every day, but they are very nice to look at, and I think it civilizes one.”
“You’re not to blame,” said Eleanor decisively. “You’re south-country to the backbone, and French on the top. It is we hard north-country folk, we business people, who neglect to cultivate ‘the beautiful.’ We’re quite wrong. But I think the beautiful is revenged on us,” added she with one of her quick, bright looks, “by withdrawing itself. There’s nothing comparable for ugliness to the people of a manufacturing town.”
My mind was running on certain very ingenious and tasteful methods of hanging nosegays on the wall.
“Those baskets with ferns and flowers in, against the wall, were lovely, weren’t they?” said I. “Do you think we shall ever be able to think of such pretty things?”
“We’re not fools,” said Eleanor briefly. “We shall do it when we set our minds to it. Meantime, we must make notes of whatever strikes us.”
“There are plenty of jolly, old-fashioned flowers in the garden at home,” said I. It was a polite way of expressing my inward regret that we had no tropical orchids or strange stove-plants. And Eleanor danced round me, and improvised a song beginning:
“There are ferns by Ewden’s waters,
And heather on the hill.”
From the better adornment of the Vicarage to the better adornment of ourselves was a short stride. Most of the young ladies in these country homes were very prettily dressed. Not à la Mrs. Perowne. Not in that milliner’s handbook style dear to “Promenades” and places of public resort; but more daintily, and with more attention to the prettiest and most convenient of the prevailing fashions than Eleanor’s and my costumes displayed.
The toilettes of one young lady in particular won our admiration; and when we learned that her pretty things were made by herself, an overwhelming ambition seized upon us to learn to do the same.