Sandra Belloni | Page 2

is as well to know at once that they
were not of that poor order of women who yield their admiration to a
thing for its abstract virtue only)--the ladies were scaling society by the
help of the Arts. To this laudable end sacrifices were now made to
Euterpe to assist them. As mere daughters of a merchant, they were
compelled to make their house not simply attractive, but enticing; and,
seeing that they liked music, it seemed a very agreeable device. The
Tinleys of Bloxholme still kept to dancing, and had effectually driven
away Mr. Pericles from their gatherings. For Mr. Pericles said: "If that
they will go 'so,' I will be amused." He presented a top-like triangular
appearance for one staggering second. The Tinleys did not go `so' at all,
and consequently they lost the satirical man, and were called 'the
ballet-dancers' by Adela which thorny scoff her sisters permitted to
pass about for a single day, and no more. The Tinleys were their match
at epithets, and any low contention of this kind obscured for them the
social summit they hoped to attain; the dream whereof was their prime
nourishment.
That the Tinleys really were their match, they acknowledged, upon the
admission of the despicable nature of the game. The Tinleys had
winged a dreadful shaft at them; not in itself to be dreaded, but that it
struck a weak point; it was a common shot that exploded a magazine;

and for a time it quite upset their social policy, causing them to act like
simple young ladies who feel things and resent them. The ladies of
Brookfield had let it be known that, in their privacy together, they were
Pole, Polar, and North Pole. Pole, Polar, and North Pole were
designations of the three shades of distance which they could convey in
a bow: a form of salute they cherished as peculiarly their own; being a
method they had invented to rebuke the intrusiveness of the outer world,
and hold away all strangers until approved worthy. Even friends had
occasionally to submit to it in a softened form. Arabella, the eldest, and
Adela, the youngest, alternated Pole and Polar; but North Pole was
shared by Cornelia with none. She was the fairest of the three; a
nobly-built person; her eyes not vacant of tenderness when she put off
her armour. In her war-panoply before unhappy strangers, she was a
Britomart. They bowed to an iceberg, which replied to them with the
freezing indifference of the floating colossus, when the Winter sun
despatches a feeble greeting messenger-beam from his miserable Arctic
wallet. The simile must be accepted in its might, for no lesser one will
express the scornfulness toward men displayed by this strikingly
well-favoured, formal lady, whose heart of hearts demanded for her as
spouse, a lord, a philosopher, and a Christian, in one: and he must be a
member of Parliament. Hence her isolated air.
Now, when the ladies of Brookfield heard that their Pole, Polar, and
North Pole, the splendid image of themselves, had been transformed by
the Tinleys, and defiled by them to Pole, Polony, and Maypole, they
should have laughed contemptuously; but the terrible nerve of ridicule
quivered in witness against them, and was not to be stilled. They could
not understand why so coarse a thing should affect them. It stuck in
their flesh. It gave them the idea that they saw their features hideous,
but real, in a magnifying mirror.
There was therefore a feud between the Tinleys and the Poles; and
when Mr. Pericles entirely gave up the former, the latter rewarded him
by spreading abroad every possible kind interpretation of his atrocious
bad manners. He was a Greek, of Parisian gilding, whose Parisian hat
flew off at a moment's notice, and whose savage snarl was heard at the
slightest vexation. His talk of renowned prime-donne by their Christian

names, and the way that he would catalogue emperors, statesmen, and
noblemen known to him, with familiar indifference, as things below the
musical Art, gave a distinguishing tone to Brookfield, from which his
French accentuation of our tongue did not detract.
Mr. Pericles grimaced bitterly at any claim to excellence being set up
for the mysterious voice in the woods. Tapping one forefinger on the
uplifted point of the other, he observed that to sing abroad in the night
air of an English Spring month was conclusive of imbecility; and that
no imbecile sang at all. Because, to sing, involved the highest
accomplishment of which the human spirit could boast. Did the ladies
see? he asked. They thought they saw that he carried on a deception
admirably. In return, they inquired whether he would come with them
and hunt the voice, saying that they would catch it for him. "I shall
catch