harmonised so ill with the restrictions of poverty. Their life
had a tone of melancholy, the painful reserve which characterises
a certain clearly defined class in the present day. Had they been
born twenty years earlier, the children of that veterinary
surgeon would have grown up to a very different, and in all
probability a much happier, existence, for their education would
have been limited to the strictly needful, and--certainly in the
case of the girls--nothing would have encouraged them to look
beyond the simple life possible to a poor man's offspring. But
whilst Maud and Dora were still with their homely schoolmistress,
Wattleborough saw fit to establish a Girls' High School, and the
moderateness of the fees enabled these sisters to receive an
intellectual training wholly incompatible with the material
conditions of their life. To the relatively poor (who are so much
worse off than the poor absolutely) education is in most cases a
mocking cruelty. The burden of their brother's support made it
very difficult for Maud and Dora even to dress as became their
intellectual station; amusements, holidays, the purchase of such
simple luxuries as were all but indispensable to them, could not
be thought of. It resulted that they held apart from the society
which would have welcomed them, for they could not bear to
receive without offering in turn. The necessity of giving lessons
galled them; they felt--and with every reason--that it made their
position ambiguous. So that, though they could not help knowing
many people, they had no intimates; they encouraged no one to
visit them, and visited other houses as little as might be.

In Marian Yule they divined a sympathetic nature. She was unlike
any girl with whom they had hitherto associated, and it was the
impulse of both to receive her with unusual friendliness. The