ery agreeable
device. The Tinleys of Bloxholme still kept to dancing, and had
effectually driven away Mr. Pericles from their gatherings. For Mr.
Pericles said: "If that they will go 'so,' I will be amused." He
presented a top-like triangular appearance for one staggering second. The
Tinleys did not go `so' at all, and consequently they lost the satirical
man, and were called 'the ballet-dancers' by Adela which thorny scoff her
sisters permitted to pass about for a single day, and no more. The
Tinleys were their match at epithets, and any low contention of this kind
obscured for them the social summit they hoped to attain; the dream
whereof was their prime nourishment.

That the Tinleys really were their match, they acknowledged, upon the
admission of the despicable nature of the game. The Tinleys had winged a
dreadful shaft at them; not in itself to be dreaded, but that it struck a
weak point; it was a common shot that exploded a magazine; and for a time
it quite upset their social policy, causing them to act like simple young
ladies who feel things and resent them. The ladies of Brookfield had let
it be known that, in their privacy together, they were Pole, Polar, and
North Pole. Pole, Polar, and North Pole were designations of the three
shades of distance which they could convey in a bow: a form of salute
they cherished as peculiarly their own; being a method they had invented
to rebuke the intrusiveness of the outer world, and hold away all
strangers until approved worthy. Even friends had occasionally to submit
to it in a softened form. Arabella, the eldest, and Adela, the youngest,
alternated Pole and Polar; but North Pole was shared by Cornelia with
none. She was the fairest of the three; a nobly-built person; her eyes
not vacant of tenderness when she put off her armour. In her war-panoply
before unhappy strangers, she was a Britomart. They bowed to an iceberg,
which replied to them with the freezing indifference of the floating
colossus, when the Winter sun despatches a feeble greeting messenger-beam
from his miserable Arctic wallet. The simile must be accepted in its
might, for no lesser one will express the scornfulness toward men
displayed by this strikingly well-favoured, formal lady, whose heart of
hearts demanded for her as spouse, a lord, a philosopher, and a
Christian, in one: and he must be a member of Parliament. Hence her
isolated air.

Now, when the ladies of Brookfield heard that their Pole, Polar