was loyal in her friendships, if not in her loves. I must confess that to my mind the only detail out of drawing in a portrait which seems to me, as a whole, perfectly natural and quite in harmony with itself, is her temporary turning-away from Molly, at a time when that dear child is running so serious a risk for her “sister,” “because Molly knew things to her”—Cynthia’s—discredit. Ingratitude of this sort should not have been placed to the debit account of so loveable a creature as Cynthia—loveable in spite of her errors, of her changefulness, of her preference for what is not the very highest—but hardly to be forgiven such a fault as this.

So much as to the “Daughters”, though there is a good deal more one would like to have said of them, without like the philosophical Roger or the frankly amorous Mr. Coxe claiming the privilege of human frailty, and the consequent right of being attached first to the one and then to the other. As to the “Wives” of the story it is easier to be brief. Indeed on the character of Mrs. Hamley there is no need to dwell; her picture, as that of a wife whom affection has served to console for much that she has missed, and of a mother fondly cherishing a love more delusive than that which she gives to her husband, is drawn with great tenderness and sweetness, and with a deep sense of the irony of relations which in real life rarely excite even so strong an emotion as pity. With her the hot-tempered, soft-hearted Squire, a copy from nature of a kind in which Mrs. Gaskell excels—“the life of a Yorkshire squire of the last century,” she incidentally confesses, she thinks she “could have done pretty well”—is contrasted as effectively as is the sarcastic but magnanimous doctor with his second choice. She is the wife without whom, as the advertisements say, no gallery of wives could be called complete, after she had once become known; the wife who (leaving the late Mr. Kirkpatrick out of the question) is, to all the intents and purposes that may be summed up in the word companionship, no wife at all. “Clare”—what an inspiration there is in the very name which suggests dependency, not by the necessity of fate, but by the preference of temperament! For Clare is a person whose very principle of existence is that she cannot call her soul her own—a proposition of which the inevitable corollary is that her soul must be Lady Cumnor’s, or, failing the Countess, the property of whosoever ranks next to her in the tables of Debrett. That Clare is a woman, cannot be called an accident; still the fact only harmonises with, it does not constitute the primary element in, the amalgam of her personality. Nor does it account for so extravagant an assumption as that of her eating no luncheon in order not to be thought in the habit of dining early; and, in matters of greater moment, it renders rather less probable a certain transparency of sheer worldliness which feminine tact is apt to veil, while the masculine tendency is to accentuate every faux pas by a firm putting- down of one’s foot. But of the type which she represents Clare, no doubt with subtle accuracy, reproduces the feminine species or variety. To begin with, she is not exactly false—a thing not to be borne for a moment in man or boy—but (could she help it?) she does not ring true. It is her unchangeable fate to be seen through by every one with whom she is brought into closer contact—except by the noble family at the Towers to whom she is so perfect a treasure; and, for that matter, when do we ever take the trouble to see through our dependants and servants, and what would it advantage us if we were to succeed in the attempt? But Clare has been seen through all along by her rather too clear-sighted daughter; and by her step-daughter she was seen through, long before the child could so much as dream of their future relations to one another. Also, the man whom she is to render happy en secondes noces sees through her, before his first (and final) effort at wooing is fairly over. But, though found out, she is never found out completely, or perhaps is not regarded as worthy so prolonged a research. And so she goes her way through the world, trusting, and with good reason, to the success of her method; keeping up “that sweet, false tone which of late had gone through Molly, like the scraping of a slate pencil on a slate”; and nobody (for the sake of that quiet which the verb implies) is found more ready to acquiesce in her ways than her sagacious husband — unless, indeed, an ethical difficulty or so should intervene between them. Of course, this very acquiescence helps to deteriorate a character—or, at least, the outward presentment of a character—which will not, so to speak, bear much deterioration; and it must be allowed that this particular Clare, as a conversationalist in her own drawing-room, occasionally draws dangerously near to the level of Mrs. Nickleby. Yet she is capable of illustrating her maxims of social morality by quotations (or the ghosts of quotations) suggestive of the fact that it was at one time her professional duty to impart oral instruction. Unlike her softness of manner, her elegance of bearing, and certain other minor claims, Clare’s innate selfishness is of no sex; neither, I take it, is her morigeration