which is never quite apart from the pride of developed beauty. They were
as upright as Oriental girls, whose heads are nobly poised from carrying
the pitcher to the well. Dark Rhoda might have passed for Rachel, and
Dahlia called her Rachel. They tossed one another their mutual
compliments, drawn from the chief book of their reading. Queen of Sheba
was Dahlia's title. No master of callisthenics could have set them up
better than their mother's receipt for making good blood, combined with a
certain harmony of their systems, had done; nor could a schoolmistress
have taught them correcter speaking. The characteristic of girls having
a disposition to rise, is to be cravingly mimetic; and they remembered,
and crooned over, till by degrees they adopted the phrases and manner of
speech of highly grammatical people, such as the rector and his lady, and
of people in story-books, especially of the courtly French fairy-books,
wherein the princes talk in periods as sweetly rounded as are their
silken calves; nothing less than angelically, so as to be a model to
ordinary men.

The idea of love upon the lips of ordinary men, provoked Dahlia's irony;
and the youths of Wrexby and Fenhurst had no chance against her secret
Prince Florizels. Them she endowed with no pastoral qualities; on the
contrary, she conceived that such pure young gentlemen were only to be
seen, and perhaps met, in the great and mystic City of London.
Naturally, the girls dreamed of London. To educate themselves, they
copied out whole pages of a book called the `Field of Mars,' which was
next to the family Bible in size among the volumes of the farmer's small
library. The deeds of the heroes of this book, and the talk of the fairy
princes, were assimilated in their minds; and as they looked around them
upon millers', farmers', maltsters', and tradesmen's sons, the thought of
what manner of youth would propose to marry them became a precocious
tribulation. Rhoda, at the age of fifteen, was distracted by it, owing