Not to be Caught Napping.
MORE SHE-NOTES.
(By Iōpna, Author of "A Yellow Plaster.")
Chapter I.
"Virginibus puerisque," said Miss Constantia Demning; "and it's by a man!"
"By a man!" echoed the awe-struck Athanasia.
"And to think that in spite of all our pioneering and efforts to confine her studies to the New Woman Series our niece may even now have tasted of the tree and be bursting out into throbbing nerve-centres and palpable possibilities. Compare we two with her! Have you noted her restless craving after Philistine delights such as man-worship and a literary style? Thank Heaven, she never got that from us or our books."
The speakers were a pair of old Purgatorial Twins, not without alleviations, designed by Nature to multiply. But aloofness, coupled in harness with anæmia, had nipped the wilding shoots in the bud and won hands down at the distance. True, in the scraggy past, there had been a male creature, less curate than Cupid, that each of them had saved her soul alive in the memory of. But the cares of celibacy, cruel-heavy as a portmanteau-metaphor, now weighed on their shoulders; they could not crush them with a burial-spade like complete natures; they stamped their faces (the cares did the twins' faces) with their ponderous crow's feet.