1st Gent. What woman should be? Sir, consult the taste                    Of marriageable men. This planet’s store
                   In iron, cotton, wool, or chemicals—
                   All matter rendered to our plastic skill,
                   Is wrought¹ in shapes responsive to demand;
                   The market’s pulse makes index high or low,
                   By rule sublime². Our daughters must be wives,
                   And to the wives must be what men will choose;
                   Men’s taste is woman’s test. You mark the phrase?
                   ‘Tis good, I think?—the sense well-winged and poised³
                   With t’s and s’s.
  2nd Gent.                      Nay⁴, but turn it round;
                   Give us the test of taste. A fine menu—
                   Is it to-day what Roman epicures⁵
                   Insisted that a gentleman must eat
                   To earn the dignity of dining well?
Brackenshaw Park, where the archery meeting was held, looked out from its gentle heights far over the neighboring valley to the outlying eastern downs and the broad, slow rise of cultivated country, hanging like a vast curtain toward the west. The castle which stood on the highest platform of the clustered hills, was built of rough-hewn limestone⁶, full of lights and shadows made by the dark dust of lichens⁷ and the washings of the rain. Masses of beech⁸ and fir sheltered it on the north, and spread down here and there along the green slopes like flocks seeking the water which gleamed below. The archery-ground was a carefully-kept enclosure on a bit of table-land at the farthest end of the park, protected toward the southwest by tall elms and a thick screen of hollies⁹, which kept the gravel¹⁰ walk and the bit of newly-mown turf where the targets were placed in agreeable afternoon shade. The Archery Hall with an arcade¹¹ in front showed like a white temple against the greenery on the north side.
 
What could make a better background for the flower-groups of ladies, moving and bowing and turning their necks as it would become the leisurely¹² lilies to do if they took to locomotion¹³. The sounds too were very pleasant to hear, even when the military band from Wanchester ceased to play: musical laughs in all the registers and a harmony of happy, friendly speeches, now rising toward mild excitement, now sinking to an agreeable murmur¹⁴.
 
No open-air amusement could be much freer from those noisy, crowding conditions which spoil most modern pleasures; no Archery Meeting could be more select, the number of friends accompanying the members being restricted by an award of tickets, so as to keep the maximum within the limits of convenience for the dinner and ball to be held in the castle. Within the enclosure no plebeian¹⁵ spectators were admitted except Lord Brackenshaw’s tenants¹⁶ and their families, and of these it was chiefly the feminine members who used the privilege, bringing their little boys and girls or younger brothers and sisters. The males among them relieved the insipidity¹⁷ of the entertainment by imaginative betting, in which the stake was “anything you like,” on their favorite archers¹⁸; but the young maidens¹⁹, having a different principle of discrimination, were considering which of those sweetly-dressed ladies they would choose to be, if the choice were allowed them. Probably the form these rural souls would most have striven for as a tabernacle, was some other than Gwendolen’s—one with more pink in her cheeks and hair of the most fashionable yellow; but among the male judges in the ranks immediately surrounding her there was unusual unanimity²⁰ in pronouncing her the finest girl present.
 
No wonder she enjoyed her existence on that July day. Pre-eminence is sweet to those who love it, even under mediocre²¹ circumstances. Perhaps it was not quite mythical²² that a slave has been proud to be bought first; and probably a barn-door fowl²³ on sale, though he may not have understood himself to be called the best of a bad lot, may have a self-informed consciousness of his relative importance, and strut²⁴ consoled. But for complete enjoyment²⁵ the outward and the inward must concur²⁶. And that concurrence²⁷ was happening to Gwendolen.
 
Who can deny that bows and arrows are among the prettiest weapons in the world for feminine forms to play with? They prompt attitudes full of grace and power, where that fine concentration of energy seen in all markmanship, is freed from associations of bloodshed. The time-honored British resource of “killing something” is no longer carried on with bow and quiver; bands defending their passes against an invading nation fight under another sort of shade than a cloud of arrows; and poisoned darts²⁸ are harmless survivals either in rhetoric²⁹ or in regions comfortably remote. Archery has no ugly smell of brimstone; breaks nobody’s shins, breeds no athletic³⁰ monsters; its only danger is that of failing, which for generous blood is enough to mould skilful³¹ action. And among the Brackenshaw archers the prizes were all of the nobler symbolic³² kind; not properly to be carried off in a parcel, degrading honor into gain; but the gold arrow and the silver, the gold star and the silver, to be worn for a long time in sign of achievement and then transferred to the next who did excellently. These signs of pre-eminence had the virtue³³ of wreaths without their inconveniences, which might have produced a melancholy³⁴ effect in the heat of the ball-room. Altogether the Brackenshaw Archery Club was an institution framed with good taste, so as not to have by necessity any ridiculous incidents.
 
And to-day all incalculable elements were in its favor. There was mild warmth, and no wind to disturb either hair or drapery or the course of the arrow; all skillful preparation had fair play, and when there was a general march to extract the arrows, the promenade³⁵ of joyous³⁶ young creatures in light speech and laughter, the graceful³⁷ movement in common toward a common object, was a show worth looking at. Here Gwendolen seemed a Calypso among her nymphs. It was in her attitudes and movements that every one was obliged to admit her surpassing charm.
 
“That girl is like a high-mettled racer,” said Lord Brackenshaw to young Clintock, one of the invited spectators.
 
“First chop! tremendously pretty too,” said the elegant Grecian, who had been paying her assiduous attention; “I never saw her look better.”
 
Perhaps she had never looked so well. Her face was beaming with young pleasure in which there was no malign³⁸ rays of discontent; for being satisfied with her own chances, she felt kindly³⁹ toward everybody and was satisfied with the universe. Not to have the highest distinction in rank, not to be marked out as an heiress, like Miss Arrowpoint, gave an added triumph in eclipsing those advantages. For personal recommendation she would not have cared to change the family group accompanying her for any other: her mamma’s appearance would have suited an amiable⁴⁰ duchess; her uncle and aunt Gascoigne with Anna made equally gratifying figures in their way; and Gwendolen was too full of joyous belief in herself to feel in the least jealous though Miss Arrowpoint was one of the best archeresses.
 
Even the reappearance of the formidable Herr Klesmer, which caused some surprise in the rest of the company, seemed only to fall in with Gwendolen’s inclination⁴¹ to be amused. Short of Apollo himself, what great musical maestro could make a good figure at an archery meeting? There was a very satirical light in Gwendolen’s eyes as she looked toward the Arrowpoint party on their first entrance, when the contrast between Klesmer and the average group of English country people seemed at its utmost intensity⁴² in the close neighborhood of his hosts—or patrons, as Mrs. Arrowpoint would have liked to hear them called, that she might deny the possibility of any longer patronizing genius, its royalty⁴³ being universally acknowledged. The contrast might have amused a graver personage than Gwendolen. We English are a miscellaneous people, and any chance fifty of us will present many varieties of animal architecture or facial ornament⁴⁴; but it must be admitted that our prevailing⁴⁵ expression is not that of a lively, impassioned race, preoccupied⁴⁶ with the ideal and carrying the real as a mere⁴⁷ make-weight. The strong point of the English gentleman pure is the easy style of his figure and clothing; he objects to marked ins and outs in his costume, and he also objects to looking inspired.
 
Fancy an assemblage where the men had all that ordinary stamp of the well-bred Englishman, watching the entrance of Herr Klesmer—his mane of hair floating backward in massive inconsistency with the chimney-pot hat, which had the look of having been put on for a joke above his pronounced but well-modeled features and powerful clear-shaven mouth and chin; his tall, thin figure clad in a way which, not being strictly⁴⁹ English, was all the worse for its apparent emphasis of intention. Draped in a loose garment with a Florentine berretta on his head, he would have been fit to stand by the side of Leonardo de Vinci; but how when he presented himself in trousers which were not what English feeling demanded about the knees?—and when the fire that showed itself in his glances and the movements of his head, as he looked round him with curiosity, was turned into comedy by a hat which ruled that mankind should have well-cropped hair and a staid demeanor⁵⁰, such, for example, as Mr. Arrowsmith’s, whose nullity of face and perfect tailoring might pass everywhere without ridicule<............