ss....
She might have sat for a statue of Motherhood--of Charity with a babe at
her ample breast, and others clinging to her supporting hand; Nature had
so evidently intended her to play the part.'

Katherine Knowles has fine physical symmetry and a strong, frank face.
While lacking 'the airs and graces, the superficial brightness, of
conventional girlhood,' she is 'singularly vivid in her more substantial
way.'

Betty Ochiltree's beauty, too, is of the kind that wears well. She has a
face 'frank and spirited, firm of mouth and chin, kind and sweet, as
honest as the day,' surmounting an ample body, and she carries herself
with dignity, 'as few Australian girls can do.' And how impressive and
consistent with her character is the noble, placid figure of Elizabeth
King, 'perfect in proportion, fine in texture, full of natural dignity
and ease!'

The author is fond of showing the attractiveness of such women at the
age of thirty, or even more. 'In real life,' she once observes, 'the
supremely interesting woman is not a girl of eighteen, as she is in
fiction. Every man worth calling a man knows that. A girl of that age
... knows as much about love as does a young animal in the spring, and
not a bit more. And the human male of these days--so highly developed,
so subtly compounded--has grown out of the stage when that much would
satisfy him. I mean, of course, the human male who in real life answers
to the hero in fiction--a man who must have left, not only his teens,
but his twenties behind him.'

When one comes to the heroes, it is easy to recall half a dozen
commanding figures who blunder in the most natural and amiable manner in
their affairs; who think a good deal more of their immediate personal
comforts than of religious or ethical abstractions; who like their own
way and try to get it; who, in short, are mostly what the author wishes
them to appear--'the men out of books that we meet every day.' Of little
men, in the physical sense, there are only two of any importance, but
even these are virile and masterful. A general aim of the stories would
seem to be to show the sexes what each chiefly admires in the other. It
is first a sort of apotheosis of the _mens sana in corpore sano_, and
after that an illustration of the independent attractions of sympathy,
gentleness, culture, and high character.

Though in most cases the strongest attachments are formed between men
and women arrived at an age to discriminate beyond