too crushingly unanimous.

Mrs. Blodgett was helped in her duties by her niece, Miss Maria, and by
her sister, Miss Williams. Miss Maria was a little wisp of a woman; I
do not know her age then, but I think, were she alive today, she would
confess to about eighty-three. She wore ringlets, after the fashion
of the early nineteenth-century books of beauty. Her face was thin and
narrow, and ordinarily pale; but when Miss Maria had been a little while
in conversation with one or more of the gallant Yankee captains you
might see in the upper corner of each cheek a slight touch of red. For
though I would not call the little lady coquettish--that is too coarse
and obvious a word--yet there was in her that inalienable consciousness
of maidenhood, that sentiment, at once of attraction and of recoil,
towards creatures of the opposite sex, that gentle hope of pleasing man,
that secret emotion of being pleased by him, that tremor at the idea of
being desired, and that flush at the thought of being desirable, which,
I suppose, may animate the mystic sensibilities of spinsterhood. She
was anything but aggressive and confident, yet there was a modest, puny
poise about her; she was like a plant that has always lived in a narrow,
city flower-pot, at a window too seldom visited by the sun, which has
never known the freedom of the rain, but has been skimpingly watered
out of a toy watering-pot; which has never so much as conceived of the
daring and voluptuous charms of its remote sisters of the forest and
garden, but has cherished its rudimentary perfume and its incipient
tints in a light reflected from brick walls and in the thin, stale
atmosphere of rear sitting-rooms. Yet it knows that it is a flower, and
that it might, somehow, fulfil its destiny and be beautiful. So Miss
Maria had, no doubt, hidden thoughts remotely derived from Mother Eve
and from Grecian Helen; she was aware of the potentiality in herself of
all virgin privileges and powers, and assumed thereupon her own little
dignity. Never but once did I see a masculine arm round Miss Maria's
trig, stiff little waist, and that was at Christmas-time, when there
were sprigs of mistletoe over every doorway; but, mistletoe or not, the
owner of that arm, if he did succeed in ravishing a kiss, got his ears
smartly boxed the next moment. I don't know precisely what was Miss
Maria's function in the economy of the household; I can fancy her
setting the table, and adding touches of neatnes