Charlotte was brought round to the distasteful idea of some help coming
from a legitimate adjunct at his elbow: a restraining woman--wife, it had
to be said. And to name the word wife for Thomas Rowsley, Earl of
Ormont, put up the porcupine quills she bristled with at the survey of a
sex thirsting, and likely to continue thirsting, for such honour. What
woman had she known fit to bear the name? She had assumed the judicial
seat upon the pretensions of several, and dismissed them to their limbo,
after testifying against them. Who is to know the fit one in these mines
of deception? Women of the class offering wives decline to be taken on
trial; they are boxes of puzzles--often dire surprises. Her brother knew
them well enough to shy at the box. Her brother Rowsley had a funny
pride, like a boy at a game, at the never having been caught by one among
the many he made captive. She let him have it all to himself.

He boasted it to a sister sharing the pride exultant in the cry of the
hawk, scornful of ambitions poultry, a passed finger-post to the plucked,
and really regretful that no woman had been created fit for him. When
she was not aiding with her brother, women, however contemptible for
their weakness, appeared to her as better than barn-door fowl, or vermin
in their multitudes gnawing to get at the cheese-trap. She could be
humane, even sisterly, with women whose conduct or prattle did not
outrage plain sense, just as the stickler for the privileges of her class
was large-heartedly charitable to the classes flowing in oily orderliness
round about below it--if they did so flow. Unable to read woman's
character, except upon the broadest lines as it were the spider's main
threads of its web, she read men minutely, from the fact that they were
neither mysteries nor terrors to her; but creatures of importunate
appetites, humorous objects; very manageable, if we leave the road to
their muscles, dress their wounds, smoothe their creases, plume their
vanity; and she had an unerring eye for the man to be used when a blow