to property: by fits she was even elated at
the notion of being lady of the manor, and having tenants and an estate: she was
especially tickled with an agreeable complacency when reminded of »all that
property« down in the Hollow, »comprising an excellent cloth-mill, dyehouse,
warehouse, together with the messuage, gardens, and outbuildings, termed
Hollow's cottage;« but her exultation being quite undisguised was singularly
inoffensive; and, for her serious thoughts, they tended elsewhere. To admire the
great, reverence the good, and be joyous with the genial, was very much the bent
of Shirley's soul: she mused therefore on the means of following this bent far
oftener than she pondered on her social superiority.
    In Caroline, Miss Keeldar had first taken an interest because she was quiet,
retiring, looked delicate, and seemed as if she needed some one to take care of
her. Her predilection increased greatly when she discovered that her own way of
thinking and talking was understood and responded to by this new acquaintance.
She had hardly expected it. Miss Helstone, she fancied, had too pretty a face,
manners and voice too soft, to be anything out of the common way in mind and
attainments; and she very much wondered to see the gentle features light up
archly to the reveillé of a dry sally or two risked by herself; and more did she
wonder to discover the self-won knowledge treasured, and the untaught
speculations working in that girlish, curl-veiled head. Caroline's instinct of
taste, too, was like her own: such books as Miss Keeldar had read with the most
pleasure, were Miss Helstone's delight also. They held many aversions too in
common, and could have the comfort of laughing together over works of false
sentimentality and pompous pretension.
    Few, Shirley conceived, men or women have the right taste in poetry: the
right sense for discriminating between what is real and what is false. She had
again and again heard very clever people pronounce this or that passage, in this
or that versifier, altogether admirable, which, when she read, her soul refused
to acknowledge as anything but cant, flourish, and tinsel, or at the best,
elaborate wordiness; curious, clever, learned perhaps; haply even tinged with
the fascinating hues of fancy, but, God knows, as different from real poetry as
the gorgeous and massy vase of mosaic is from the little cup of pure metal; or,
to give the reader a choice of similes, as the milliner's artificial wreath is
from the