'Probably,' said Mrs. Wrottesley, 'Jane's shortcomings in this respect are due to the fact that she is lamentably unaffected. Affectation, in the case of girls who ride straight and don't know what it is to have a headache, very often takes the form of boyishness. Let us console ourselves with the fact that, being perfectly natural, Jane has escaped masculinity.'
'Jane is a lady,' said Miss Abingdon severely, and with the faint suggestion of administering a snub. 'But,' she added, with that touch of superiority in her manner which obtruded itself in most of her conversation with the vicar's wife, 'there are certain accepted traditions of womanhood such as conventionality approves, and it was not called artificial to conform to them when I was a girl.'
'I remember,' said Mrs. Wrottesley, 'that we honestly thought that we were interesting when we ate very little, and I myself often used to aspire to an attractive display of timidity when inwardly I had no sensation of fear.'
As the wife of the vicar of the parish Mrs. Wrottesley wore brown merino and a mantle, but these hid a great soul securely held in check and narrowed down by a strict adherence to the small conventions and paralysing rules which society seems to have prescribed for vicars and their wives in the rural parishes of England. She prayed every morning of her life for more faith, and meant by that a narrower creed. Mrs. Wrottesley was an inarticulate woman, and had gained for herself the character of being reserved.
Her own view of things differed in all essentials from the opinions which were held by those about her, and were even inwardly opposed to theories which her husband, with such gentlemanly eloquence, expounded every Sunday morning. People thought themselves charitable when they merely said that they did not understand Mrs. Wrottesley.
'The modern girl has a good effect upon society,' she continued; 'and she is not a cat.'
'Ah, yes,' allowed Miss Abingdon, conceding a point, but prepared with unanswerable argument; 'but will she ever be loved as the old eternal feminine was loved?'
'Many people believe,' said Mrs. Wrottesley, 'that you can't be a man's divinity and surround yourself with a golden halo, and be his pal at the same time.'
'I remember,' said Miss Abingdon reminiscently, and feeling that she was still scoring heavily against her friend—'I remember we used to come down to breakfast in light gloves to match our gowns, and we drew them on when the meal was over and only removed them in the morning-room when we had taken out our embroidery to work at it.'
'And when embroidery bored us,' said Mrs. Wrottesley, 'we thought we were in love.'