Critically, moreover, her admission of great poppy-heads into her garden
was objected to. She would squander her care on poppies, and she had
been heard to say that, while she lived, her children should be fully
fed. The encouragement of flaunting weeds in a decent garden was
indicative of a moral twist that the expressed resolution to supply her
table with plentiful nourishment, no matter whence it came, or how
provided, sufficiently confirmed. The reason with which she was stated
to have fortified her stern resolve was of the irritating order, right in
the abstract, and utterly unprincipled in the application. She said,
`Good bread, and good beef, and enough of both, make good blood; and my
children shall be stout.' This is such a thing as maybe announced by
foreign princesses and rulers over serfs; but English Wrexby, in
cogitative mood, demanded an equivalent for its beef and divers economies
consumed by the hungry children of the authoritative woman. Practically
it was obedient, for it had got the habit of supplying her. Though
payment was long in arrear, the arrears were not treated as lost ones by
Mrs. Fleming, who, without knowing it, possessed one main secret for
mastering the custodians of credit. She had a considerate remembrance
and regard for the most distant of her debts, so that she seemed to be
only always a little late, and exceptionally wrongheaded in theory.
Wrexby, therefore, acquiesced in helping to build up her children to
stoutness, and but for the blindness of all people, save artists, poets,
novelists, to the grandeur of their own creations, the inhabitants of
this Kentish village might have had an enjoyable pride in the beauty and
robust grace of the young girls,--fair-haired, black-haired girls, a
kindred contrast, like fire and smoke, to look upon. In stature, in
bearing, and in expression, they were, if I may adopt the eloquent modern
manner of eulogy, strikingly above their class. They carried erect
shoulders, like creatures not ashamed of showing a merely animal pride,