d a sight of
the letter from Mr. Eglett. She laid it in her desk, understanding well
that it was a laugh lost to the world. Poets could reasonably feign it
to shake the desk inclosing it. She had a strong sense of humour; her
mind reverted to the desk in a way to make her lips shut grimly. She
sided with her brother.

Only pen in hand did he lay himself open to the enemy. In his personal
intercourse he was the last of men to be taken at a disadvantage. Lady
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