"There were giants in those days," broke in Miss Hope, vigorously. "Luther was a grand man, and so was Zwingle." Miss Hope spoke in a loud but not unpleasing voice. She was a stout, fresh-colored woman, not without a certain degree of comeliness. In her young days she had been too high-coloured for beauty, but now the grey hair toned and softened her down.
Miss Prudence was less pleasing: she was tall and angular, wore spectacles, and had that slight appendage on the upper lip which is not a strictly feminine adjunct. Her voice was thin in quality and somewhat harsh. Queenie felt that Ted's soubriquet of "the dragon" was not badly bestowed. It was she who held the purse-strings of the little household, and who guarded the proprieties. Miss Hope, in spite of her strong leaning to the Plymouth Brothers, and her somewhat injudicious tyrannies in the matter of temperance and total abstinence, was far less rigid than her strong-minded sister.
No wonder Miss Faith drooped in such an atmosphere! and then Miss Charity's voice! Queenie, who was sensitive on such matters, found fault with the ceaseless flow of words that proceeded from the bay-window. "She is egotistical, selfish; she works that poor sister of hers to death, I know she does," thought the girl to herself, with a certain youthful antagonism against oppression. "Miss Faith is a saint; but I wonder how she can bear it."
Queenie was a little hard in her judgment, as young people often are in their estimate of things and people. There was selfishness, and possibly oppression, in the continual sisterly sacrifice demanded as a right; in the unpitying claims made on the health and time so ungrudgingly bestowed upon her.
In life, real life, we see these sort of sacrifices perpetually exacted before our eyes somehow. Human flesh and blood revolts against the sight. The strong, sometimes the young, compelled to put away their own life, and spend some of their best years chained to the couch of helplessness; condemned to share the burthen of an invalid existence; exposed to petty tyrannies and tempers, and bearing them out of pity for the suffering that provokes them.
Sometimes, indeed, it may be a labor of love, a life within a life, of many-folded sweetnesses blossoming out of the pain, as in the case of an afflicted parent or husband. Nay, one often see admirable lives of sisterly or brotherly devotion. Yet are there sadder cases, when duty and not love is the main-spring of action; when the self-sacrifice is bitter though voluntary; when the watcher would willingly change places with the watched, that the bounding pulse of health might be subdued; that the keen suffering of repression and yearning, and God only knows what bitter measure of woman's pain, might be dulled and quieted by mere bodily weakness.
To be free, only to be free, and live their own lives—that is what some women vainly crave; and then a stone is given them for bread. Instead of work comes waiting—the hardest and most trying form of work; instead of freedom a mesh of finely-woven duties, light as gossamer threads, yet binding the conscience like cart-ropes.
Queenie sat and mused with inward rebellion while Charity talked about her books, and showed her manuscript volumes of finely-copied extracts. "I always write out passages that please me; it is such a resource to read them afterwards. I want Faith to do the same, but she likes mending and watering her flowers. I prefer thoughts to flowers, Miss Marriott."
"Every one has a right to their taste. I think I share Miss Faith's," returned the girl, a little ungraciously. She felt no pity for the bright-eyed, faded little woman, who made so much of her life, and hid away her sufferings bravely, much as the silk, patched coverlet hid the useless shrunken limbs.
She would not even allow to Cathy that she could have ever been pretty, as they walked home together through the summer rain.