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20 even those who most habitually visited their house at Brixham would have said that Catherine was the dominant spirit, and that the gentle Elizabeth groaned under her yoke. She was tall, a little gaunt in face and hard of feature, and a gruff masculinity of voice and an abrupt address confirmed the impression made by her appearance. Her very acts of kindness were obscured by the uncompromising character of her manners, and it is doubtful whether Johnson himself would not have said that of the two sisters Miss Cathie represented justice and Miss Elizabeth mercy. She was reticent also, and constitutionally incapable of showing her real self to others except in kind deeds so ungraciously performed as to make them of doubtful import, and she seemed ashamed of them, hastening to cover them up with gruff speeches.

It was a tragedy of elderly spinsterhood, in fact, that was daily played by her. Hypocrite she could not be called, since it was not in her power, as far as she was aware, to put into her outward appearance and manners the kindliness that was hers, though if to be a hypocrite is to conceal one's real nature, it must be confessed that it is hard to see why she should not fall under the name, unless intentional concealment is a necessary qualification. Hypocrisy, at any rate, was forced on her; she was incapable of showing her best; she habitually kept it out of sight, even as others conceal their worst, and it was this involuntary concealment that all her life had been her tragedy. As something of a hoyden when a girl, she had yearned for the soft joys of womanhood and the hard sweet duties of wifehood, yet all the time she hid herself, and though longing to embrace and welcome the common lot of womankind, she had held herself at arm's length. And as the years went by, they brought no merciful hardening to her nature; outwardly she became a little more grim, a little less cordial in manner, but the passage of time which stiffened her joints—for she suffered a good deal of silent discomfort from rheumatism—brought no stiffening to her soul. Her heart had remained, indeed, most inconveniently young, its sympathies were all with youth and its fervours, even at an age when the most cordial and expansive are beginning to withdraw into themselves a little and tell themselves, with good sense, that these things are no longer for them, and acquiesce in their limitations. But poor Aunt Catherine did not acquiesce at all; she daily rebelled, and daily, with a dreadful distinctness, showed herself ungracious to the view, but knew that she but parodied her real self.