“A little military society is so pleasant, is it not?” said Miss Clifford. “That you will find is one of the great advantages of Wroxton, Miss Avesham. We have so many factors in our little world. It is quite a miniature capital. There is the close, there is the town, there is the garrison, and there is the county.”

Miss Clifford spoke in a very quiet voice, and glowed gently as she spoke, turning for approval to her sister Clara, who rode the bicycle a fortnight before up and down Bolton Street.

Clara was forty-two, and her sister a year or two older. They lived in Montrose Villa and they were calling on Jeannie Avesham.

Jeannie gave a little rippling laugh, and pushed back her hair from her forehead. She had been out in the garden with Aunt Em when her callers were announced, and as the drawing-room windows commanded[65] the mulberry-tree under which they had been sitting, she had not been able to go upstairs to brush her hair, as she was aware of the four mild eyes of the two Miss Cliffords raking her from the windows. Aunt Em had altogether refused to come in, leaving Jeannie to entertain the callers alone. She had expressed a wish, however, that a cup of tea should be sent out to her in the garden, which Jeannie had flatly refused to do. “If you won’t come and help me, you sha’n’t have your tea,” she had said.

But the Miss Cliffords were so refreshing that she was almost glad Aunt Em had not come. She thought she could enjoy them more alone.

“It all sounds delightful,” she said. “You know I have never lived in a country town before; we were either at Morton or in London, and it is all quite new to me. But I love new things.”

“I think you will find the charm of Wroxton grow,” said Miss Clara. “Certainly we all find that it grows on us. My sister and I are always glad to get back after our summer holiday to all our work and[66] interests. We are very fond of our little centre.”

“I am sure I shall find it charming,” said Jeannie. “Do tell me more. Tell me about the people here. What do you all do?”

“We have charming neighbours,” said Miss Ph?be. “One of them is a relation of yours, is he not—Colonel Raymond?”

“Colonel Raymond?” asked Jeannie. “I don’t know him, I think. What relation is he to us? You see, my mother had so many brothers and sisters. I am really very ignorant about my cousins.”

“He is related through his wife, I think,” said Miss Ph?be. “His wife’s sister, I think, married a Mr. Fortescue.”

Jeannie laughed again.

“Well, I’m not so much to blame,” she said, “for the relationship is not very close. In fact, one is more nearly related to his wife. What is Mrs. Raymond like?”

“A very quiet, sweet woman,” said Miss Clara, “and very unlike her husband. He is a very dashing, military sort of man.”

Jeannie pondered a moment.

“Oh, now I remember,” she said.[67] “I’m sure he called here, while we were settling in. But Arthur and I were undoing the drawing-room carpet, so I had to say we were out. Do tell me some more. What do you all do?”

Miss Clifford looked puzzled.

“We find our days very full,” she said. “Household duties take up a good deal of our time, and then we have our relaxations. My sister’s great hobby is literary work.”

“Oh, Ph?be!” ejaculated Miss Clara, blushing.

“Oh, but how delightful!” put in Jeannie. “Do you write much?”

“Clara has had fourteen poems in the Wroxton Chronicle,” said Miss Ph?be, with proper pride, “and another appears next week.”

“I must get it,” said Jeannie.

“Perhaps, if you are so kind as to take an interest in what I do,” said Miss Clara, “you would allow me, Miss Avesham, to send you a copy. It would be a great pleasure. The editor always sends me half a dozen copies.”

“That would be very nice of you,” said[68] Jeannie. “And what is your hobby, Miss Clifford?”

“My sister plays the mandolin beautifully,” said Miss Clara. “She was a pupil of Professor Rimanez.”

“Why, how charming!” said Jeannie. “Do bring it round here some day, Miss Clifford, and we will have duets. I, too, play a little.”

“It would be a great pleasure,” said Miss Clifford, “but I am only a very poor performer.”

The two Miss Cliffords were thawing like icicles in June. They hardly remembered that they were having tea alone with the daughter and sister of a peer.

“Then there is the Ladies’ Literary union,” said Miss Clara. “We meet every fortnight, and very improving and sometimes entertaining pieces are read.”

“All the members read papers in turn, I suppose,” said Jeannie.

“Yes, and then we discuss the paper. Next week we have a great treat. Mrs. Collingwood is going to read us a paper on The Downward Tendency of Modern Fiction. I[69] got the notice this morning. Mrs. Collingwood is a great critic, but rather severe, so my sister and I think.”

“Mrs. Collingwood?” asked Jeannie. “Oh, yes, I remember her; she called the other day. I thought she was rather severe, too. I am afraid she was very much shocked at my not knowing what the Girls’ Friendly Society was. But how should I know? I don’t think there is one in London. Oh, yes, she must be a teetotaler—so my aunt and I thought. Is that so?”

Miss Clifford looked solemn. It was difficult to conceive of any one not knowing that Mrs. Collingwood was a teetotaler.

“Indeed, she is,” she replied. “Would it be inquisitive if I asked what occurred?”

“Not in the least,” said Jeannie. “My aunt only asked me to tell the cook to see that the mulberries were gathered to make mulberry gin. I said I would be sure to remember.”

“Yes, Mrs. Collingwood is very strict,” said Clara. “But she is so practical and so much in earnest. She says that so many books have a tendency to upset people’s faith,[70] and that is very shocking if she is right about it. A friend of hers, she told me, the other day had had her faith very much shaken by reading a free-thinking novel.”

“A free-thinking novel?” said Jeannie. “I don’t think I ever saw one.”

“Well, there is Robert Elsmere,” said Miss Clifford. “I have never read it, but Mrs. Collingwood says that it is terribly upsetting.”

“Of course there is some discussion about theological questions in those books,” said Jeannie, “though I never finished Robert Elsmere. But don’t you think it may have been the fault of Mrs. Collingwood’s friend that her faith was shaken?”

Miss Clifford looked grave.

“Surely not,” she said. “The responsibility must lie with the author. If the book had never been written, no one’s faith would ever have been upset. Don’t you think so?”

“Perhaps you are right,” said Jeannie. “I never really thought about it. Don’t you think we look wonderfully settled in, considering how short a time we have been here?[71]”

Miss Clara clasped her hands.

“It is all quite beautiful,” she said. “And what a lovely garden you have.”

“Yes, it is pretty,” said Jeannie. “And there is a fountain with a basin round it, in which are water-lilies. Arthur says we must give a water picnic there.”

“I had no idea you had so extensive a piece of water,” said Miss Ph?be, gravely.

“Oh, it’s only a joke,” said Jeannie, “and a very small one. Must you be going?”

“We must, indeed,” said Miss Ph?be. “Come, Clara, you would linger here forever unless I tore you away. We have already far exceeded our time, and taken up far too much of Miss Avesham’s.”

The Miss Cliffords walked some little way in silence.

“There is quite an air about the house,” said Miss Clara, at length. “It is quite different from even Colonel Raymond’s, and Mrs. Raymond’s drawing-room always seemed to us so refined.”

“Yes, it was quite different,” said Phoebe, “and I don’t know how it was produced. The piano I saw was just at the same[72] angle from the wall as ours. I am glad we have got that right, Clara.”

“I think we have too many little things about,” said Clara; “there must be ten vases on our chimneypiece, if there’s one, and I noticed there was only a clock and two candlesticks on Miss Avesham’s. Yet it looked ever so much more furnished than ours. Let us aim at a greater simplicity, Ph?be.”

The two Miss Cliffords lived in what is known as a “highly desirable detached mansion,” and its desirability was much enhanced by its being known as Montrose Villa. It is probable that the owner took his hint from Mrs. Raymond’s happy thought of calling her house “Lammermoor,” but the Miss Cliffords had gone one better, for the last six months they had dated all their letters “Villa Montrose,” and were even thinking of having a die made for their paper and envelopes. “Villa Montrose” sounded much more delightful, and gave, as Miss Clara said, while hanging a reproduction of Carlo Dolci in the front hall, “quite an Italian air to the place.” To the ordinary eye the Villa Montrose was a plain gray house, covered with stucco, but if[73] (as the Miss Cliffords did even when alone) you called stucco, stookko, a perfectly different effect is produced. Similarly, a dwarf fir-tree which stood in the back garden was, rightly considered, a stone-pine, and visions of Tuscan valleys (the Miss Cliffords’ father had once been English chaplain at Florence) rose to the inward eye, with hardly any sense of their being pumped up from a distance. Miss Clara, in fact, got at the kernel of the matter when she said that the atmosphere with which the imagination can invest a place is wholly independent of the materials on which it works.

On the ground floor were four rooms, a drawing-room and dining-room looking out over the room, and at the back two small apartments, known as “the libry” and the studio. The walls of the studio were decorated with quite a quantity of oil pictures by the Miss Cliffords’ father, and an unfinished sketch of his stood on an easel. There was a tiger’s-skin rug on the floor, rather moth-eaten, and some low chairs. The only drawback to the room was that, as there was no fire-place, it was too cold to sit in in winter,[74] and in summer, as it was exposed to the southern sun, and had a large sky-light, you might as well, as Miss Ph?be once remarked with a certain acrimony, make your sitting-room of an oven. But in the more temperate rays of April and September nothing could be more delightful than its temperature, and, even when it was untenantable, there was a pleasure in referring to “the studio.”

The “libry” was simply one mass of books, chiefly consisting of the theological collection of the Miss Cliffords’ father. Here Miss Clara worked every morning from nine till one, and it was in itself an inspiration to be surrounded by books, although she seldom took one from its shelf. When it is said that thirteen of the fourteen original poems by her which had appeared in the Wroxton Chronicle were produced in this room (the fourteenth was produced during an attack of influenza in bed, and was called Depression) it will be seen at once that the actual area of the “libry,” which measured eight feet by ten, was no index to its potentialities, for even Shakespeare’s house at Stratford-on-Avon is no palace, and Miss[75] Clara, it is hardly necessary to say, was the president of the Ladies’ Literary union, and was considered rather Bohemian.

Her elder sister, Miss Ph?be, was, as Clara had told Jeannie, musical. She had no sitting-room, for, like Martha, she was cumbered with much serving, and she knew, and was proud to know, that Clara was the genius. But some half of the drawing-room, which would hold five people easily, was known as Ph?be’s corner, and in Ph?be’s corner was a cottage piano and mandolin, and always a vase of flowers. A cabinet photograph of the mandolin teacher, Professor Rimanez, signed “Rimanez,” no less, in the Professor’s own hand, hung on the wall. Ph?be’s corner was full.

The two sisters lived a regular and most harmonious life. Since they never sat idle, they were right in considering that they were busy, and when Miss Ph?be had spent two or three hours every morning in washing the china they had used for breakfast, ordering dinner, and marching through every room in the house, examining towels to see if they required darning, soap to see if it wanted[76] renewing, and smelling the water in the bed-room bottles, she was glad to seek refreshment about half past twelve by throwing herself into a chair in her corner and playing a Neapolitan air on her mandolin, or, with the soft pedal down for fear of disturbing Clara, trying over a song by Tosti or Pinsuti about “Life of my life, and soul of my soul.”

The tragedy of growing old, in fact, consists, if we look at it more closely, not in growing old, but in remaining young, and their irredeemable youthfulness was the pathetic fact in the lives of the Misses Clifford. The banjo-playing and the writing of youthful lyrics was a true symptom of the age they felt themselves to be, and the streaks of gray in their hair and the wrinkles in their faces were a travesty of their spirits. Since childhood they had led a perfectly serene and untroubled existence, and it was their bodies, the sheaths, and not the sword, which was rusting. They had floated slowly round and round in a backwater of life, and the adventure and romance of living swept by them, making them feel as if they and not the great stream was moving, and if they had been told[77] that it was the stream that hurried by them in turmoil and charmed bewilderment, while they were standing still, they would scarcely have credited it. This is a malady most incident to country towns.

But it would be giving a totally erroneous picture of them if the impression was left that they were unhappy or unsatisfied. Herein lay the tragedy of it to the onlooker, but to them the tragedy would begin when they became aware of it. They had aged and narrowed without knowing it. They lived the life they had lived twenty years ago, among those whose days had been distinguished by a similar uniformity, without knowing that twenty years had made a difference in them. Clara always thought that Ph?be was a girl yet, and Ph?be constantly considered that Clara was still a little flighty. Meantime they scored their little successes. Clara was congratulated on her last poem in the Wroxton Chronicle, and Ph?be sang Pinsuti in a quavering voice to the cottage piano. Then when the afternoon party was over (they gave teas at Villa Montrose), Clara would start for a reckless ride on[78] her bicycle, and Ph?be hungered for her return.

Their father had been the rector of a country village near Wroxton, and their great-uncle—a grocer—the mayor of the town. Thus Villa Montrose had a double halo round it; the grocery was sunk in the civil dignitary, and the poverty of the clergyman in the honour of his office. “My father, the rector,” “My great-uncle, the Mayor,” were notable subjects of conversation.

But this evening Miss Ph?be felt more disturbed than she had felt for many years. For many years no fresh friend and no fresh interest had touched the lives of herself and her sister, and the call they had paid on Jeannie, though they talked only on trivial subjects, and looked out on to the familiar spires of the Cathedral, had been strangely exhilarating. The impression had been conveyed to her in some subtle manner that Jeannie’s whole attitude toward life was utterly different to any she had known before. How it had been conveyed to her she could not have told you, but Jeannie’s every word and gest[79]ure she saw to be the product of a wholly new idea of life. Her hair had been untidy, yet Miss Clifford knew how different would have been the effect if it had been her own hair which wanted brushing; she lounged in a chair, with one leg crossed over the other, an attitude which Miss Clifford knew from her earliest childhood to be most unladylike, and though her manner had been utterly unstudied, and she did not, as Miss Clifford always did, press her guests to stay when they said they must be going, she gave you the impression that you were welcome.

These thoughts hovered round Miss Clifford’s head as she lay awake that night. Jeannie was so much fresher and vivacious even than Clara, who often talked and laughed more than her elder sister quite liked. How was it that Clara looked rather old and tired beside Jeannie? Could it be because she was so? And Miss Clifford, for her own peace of mind, fell asleep without solving the question.