f--left little room for the feminine consideration in Finlay's
eyes; it was not a thing, simply, that existed there with any
significance. Woman in her more attractive presentment, was a daughter
of the poets, with an esoteric, or perhaps only a symbolic, or perhaps
a merely decorative function; in any case, a creature that required an
initiation to perceive her--a process to which Finlay would have been
as unwilling as he was unlikely to submit. Not that he was destitute
of ideals about women--they would have formed in that case a strange
exception to his general outlook--but he saw them on a plane detached
and impersonal, concerned with the preservation of society the
maintenance of the home, the noble devotions of motherhood. Women had
been known, historically, to be capable of lofty sentiments and fine
actions: he would have been the last to withhold their due from women.
But they were removed from the scope of his imagination, partly by the
accidents I have mentioned and partly, no doubt, by a simple lack in him
of the inclination to seek and to know them.

So that Christie Cameron, when she came to stay with his aunt in Bross
during the few weeks after his ordination and before his departure for
Canada, found a fair light for judgement and more than a reasonable
disposition to acquiesce in the scale of her merits, as a woman, on the
part of Hugh Finlay. He was familiar with the scale of her merits before
she came; his Aunt Lizzie did little but run them up and down. When she
arrived she answered to every item she was a good height, but not too
tall; a nice figure of a woman, but not what you would call stout;
a fresh-faced body whose excellent principles were written in every
feature she had. She was five years older than Hugh, but even that he
came to accept in Aunt Lizzie's skilful exhibition as something to the
total of her advantages. A pleasant independent creature with a hundred
a year of her own, sensible and vigorous and good-tempered, belonging as
well to the pre-eminently right denomination. She had virtues that might
have figured handsomely in an advertisement had Aunt Lizzie, in
the plenitude of her good will, thought fit to take that measure on
Christie's behalf. But nothing was farther from Aunt Lizzie's mind.
We must, in fairness, add Christie Cameron to the sum of Finlay's
acquaintance with the sex; but even then the total is slender, little to
go upon.

Yet the fact which Mr Finlay would in those