It was a relief to Miss Abingdon's sombre reflections when her friend, the vicar's wife, came in for a morning call. She thought that Mrs. Wrottesley's brown merino dress and bonnet, and constraining mantle which rendered all movements of the arms impossible, looked very decorous and womanly compared with the soles of a pair of brown leather shoes, and the foreshortened figure of five feet eight of slender young womanhood stretched in strenuous devotion to her strange occupation on the lawn.
When Mrs. Wrottesley seated herself opposite the window Miss Abingdon resisted an impulse to pull down the blind.
'Yesterday,' said Miss Abingdon, glancing at her niece, 'she was trying to copy a feat which she had seen at the hippodrome, and was riding one pony and driving another tandem in front of her over some hurdles in the field.'
Mrs. Wrottesley smiled with the rather provoking indulgence with which our friends regard the follies of our relations.
'She is so young,' said Mrs. Wrottesley, 'and she is very beautiful.'
'No,' said Miss Abingdon, with inward pride at her own unwavering impartiality, 'I honestly believe that if we were to consider Jane without prejudice we should find that she is simply healthy.'
'It is a great charm,' said Mrs. Wrottesley.
'No, no,' corrected Miss Abingdon quickly, 'the charm of womanhood consists in its mysteriousness. Now, the girl of to-day is simply a good fellow. She doesn't require to be understood, and she doesn't drive men crazy; she shoves her own bicycle up hills and fights for the larger half of the keyboard of the piano.' She sighed again.
'She is a moral influence,' said Mrs. Wrottesley. Mrs. Wrottesley also alluded to the girl of the period; and Miss Abingdon thought that to refer to her as 'she' or a type, instead of 'they,' had a flavour of culture about it, but she did not mean to give in.
'Yes, yes,' she said impatiently, her love of contradicting Mrs. Wrottesley and at the same time holding her own in the discussion inclining her to undue severity, 'she is as straight as any other good fellow, and she pays up if she has lost at bridge, and would as soon think of picking a pocket as of cheating at croquet; but she is not mysterious—she is absolutely comprehensible.'