e that men and women who loved were really different
from each other, and perhaps she was right.

About this time, too, Mrs. Talbot began to produce from mysterious
treasure-caves, entered apparently from an old press in her bedroom, all
kinds of wonderful things which would be useful to Jenny some day in her
house: terrible little ornaments,--very sacred, though,--sad
quaintnesses of the spirit of beauty pathetically fumbling about in
country brains; wool mats worked in the primary colours; and such wool
wonders as a wool basket of flowers, in which real wool flowers grew out
of a wool basket which you held by an over-arching wool handle, the
whole worked with undeniable but how forlorn ingenuity,--a prehistoric
relic of Mrs. Talbot's legendary school-days: survivals from a period
which is best summed up in the one wonderful word "antimacassar," a
period when for some unrecorded reason men and women had to protect
their furniture against their oleaginous selves, and beautiful locks
were guarded from lover's fingers by coats of triple oil.

But these were things worth having, too,--bits of old lace and prim
embroidery, that bore the stamp of a refinement that is never
old-fashioned; and when Mrs. Talbot descended from the beautiful she
could show you real treasures.

I don't think there was any word in the language, not even Bible words,
which Mrs. Talbot pronounced with such an accent of solemnity as the
word "linen." The words "China" and "cut glass," and perhaps "silver,"
ran it close, but "linen" was undoubtedly the word in which all Mrs.
Talbot's sense of the seriousness of living, her sense of household
distinction, her deep sense of the importance of prosperity, and her
stern love of cleanliness found most impressive utterance.

Mrs. Talbot could never have smiled as she said "linen."

And the linen she had been storing for Jenny might indeed have been the
very stuff of which lilies are made, lilies smelling of lavender.

Such pairs of sheets! A queen might even fear to await her lord lying
amid such linen; for white indeed must be the body that dares rivalry
with Mrs. Talbot's sheets,--sheets which might indeed be said to settle
that old question of the snows of yester-year.

_Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan_?

Surely they have been settling, flake on flake, year after year, in Mrs.
Talbot's linen-press, till at last there is quite a snowdrift of fair
white linen for Jenny and Theophil to lie in.

Yes!