 mood than Barbara, less
naïve in her enthusiasms, she took for her province æsthetic criticism in its
totality, and shone rather in censure than in laudation. French she read
passably; German she had talked so much of studying that it was her belief she
had acquired it; Greek and Latin were beyond her scope, but from modern
essayists who wrote in the flamboyant style she had gathered enough knowledge of
these literatures to be able to discourse of them with a very fluent inaccuracy.
With all schools of painting she was, of course, quite familiar; the great
masters - vulgarly so known - interested her but moderately, and to praise them
was, in her eyes, to incur a suspicion of philistinism. From her preceptors in
this sphere, she had learnt certain names, old and new, which stood for more
exquisite virtues, and the frequent mention of them with a happy vagueness made
her conversation very impressive to the generality of people. The same in music.
It goes without saying that Madeline was an indifferentist in politics and on
social questions; at the introduction of such topics, she smiled.
    Zillah's position was one of more difficulty. With nothing of her sisters'
superficial cleverness, with a mind that worked slowly, and a memory
irretentive, she had a genuine desire to instruct herself, and that in a solid
way. She alone studied with real persistence, and, by the irony of fate, she
alone continually exposed her ignorance, committed gross blunders, was guilty of
deplorable lapses of memory. Her unhappy lot kept her in a constant state of
nervousness and shame. She had no worldly tact, no command of her modest
resources, yet her zeal to support the credit of the family was always driving
her into hurried speech, sure to end in some disastrous pitfall. Conscious of
æsthetic defects, Zillah had chosen for her speciality the study of the history
of civilization. But for being a Denyer, she might have been content to say that
she studied history, and in that case her life might also have been solaced by
the companionship of readable books; but, as modernism would have it, she could
not be content to base her historical inquiries on anything less than strata of
geology and biological elements, with the result that she toiled day by day at
perky little primers and compendia, and only learnt one chapter that it might be
driven out of her head by the next. Equally out of deference to her sisters, she
smothered her impulses to conventional piety, and made believe that her
spiritual life supported itself on the postulates of science. As a result of all
