good-looking woman, and a clever woman too, only not quite clever
enough to find out one slight fact--that there might be any body in the
world superior to herself.

_"Set down your value at your own huge rate,
The world will pay it"_

--for a time. And so the world had paid it pretty well to Miss
Gascoigne, but was beginning a little to weary of her; except fond Miss
Grey, who still thought that, as there never was a man like "dear
Arnold," so there was not a woman any where to compare with "dear
Henrietta."

There is always something pathetic in this sort of alliance between two
single women unconnected by blood. It implies a substitution for better
things--marriage or kindred ties; and has in some cases a narrowing
tendency. No two people, not even married people, can live alone
together for a number of years without sinking into a sort of double
selfishness, ministering to one another's fancies, humors, and even
faults in a way that is not possible, or probable, in the wider or
wholesomer life of a family. And if, as is almost invariably the case--
indeed otherwise such a tie between women could not long exist--the
stronger governs the weaker, one domineers and the other obeys, the
result is bad for both. It might be seen in the fidgety restlessness of
Miss Gascoigne, whose eyes, still full of passionate fire, lent a painful
youthfulness to her faded face, and in the lazy supineness of Miss Grey,
who seemed never to have an opinion or a thought of her own. This
was the dark side of the picture; the bright side being that it is perfectly
impossible for two women, especially single women, to live together,
in friendship and harmony, for nearly twenty years, without a firm basis