Page:The spirit of place, and other essays, Meynell, 1899.djvu/74

60 congratulation upon hearing that she had, unconsciously and unintentionally, contracted a valid marriage (with a rogue); spoils and makes common and unclean everything she touches; has but two really gentle and tender moments all through the story; and sets, once for all, the example in literature of the woman we find thenceforth, in Thackeray, in Douglas Jerrold, in Dickens, and un peu partout.

Hardly less unspiritual, in spite of their conventional romance of youth and beauty, are the daughters of the squalid one. The author, in making them simple, has not abstained from making them cunning. Their vanities are well enough, but these women are not only vain, they are so envious as to refuse admiration to a sister-in-law—one who is their rival in no way except in so much as she is a contemporary beauty. "Miss Arabella Wilmot," says the pious father and vicar, "was allowed by all (except my two daughters) to be completely pretty."

They have been left by their father in such brutal ignorance as to be instantly deceived into laughing at bad manners in error for humour. They have no pretty or sensitive instincts. "The jests of the rich," says the Vicar, referring to his own young daughters as