The Heavenly Twins | Page 8

him, but only thought of how wise he
was when he warned her to be accurate, and felt grateful. And in this
way she formed her mind upon his sayings; and as a direct result of the

long, informal, generally peripatetic lectures to which she listened
without prejudice, and upon which she brought unsuspected powers of
discrimination to bear, he had unconsciously made her a more logical,
reasoning, reasonable being than he believed it possible for a woman to
be. Poor papa! All that he really knew of his most interesting daughter
was that she was growing up a good child, physically strong and active,
morally well educated, with a fortunately equable temper; and that she
owed a great deal to him. What, precisely, was never defined. But when
the thought of his kindness recurred to him it always suffused him with
happiness.
He was a portly man, with a place in the country, and a house in town;
not rich for his position, but well off; a magistrate, and much respected;
well educated in the ideas of the ancients, with whom his own ideas on
many subjects stopped short, and hardly to be called intellectual; a
moderate Churchman, a bigoted Conservative, narrow and strongly
prejudiced rather than highly principled. He was quite ignorant of the
moral progress of the world at the present time, and ready to resent
even the upward tendency of evolution when it presented itself to him
in the form of any change, including, of course, changes for the better,
and more especially so if such change threatened to bring about an
improvement in the position of women, or increase the weight of their
influence for good in the world. The mere mention of the subject made
him rabid, and he grew apoplectic whenever he reflected upon the
monstrous pretensions of the sex at the present time. But the thing that
roused his scorn and indignation most was when a woman ventured to
enter any protest against the established order of iniquity. He allowed
that a certain number of women must of necessity be abandoned, and
raised no objection to that; but what he did consider intolerable was
that any one woman should make a stand against the degradation of her
own sex. He thought that immoral.
He was well enough to live with, however, this obstinate English
country gentleman, although without sympathetic insight, and liable to
become a petty domestic tyrant at any moment. "Sound" was what he
would have called himself. And he was a man to be envied upon the
whole, for his family loved him, and his friends knew no ill of him.

CHAPTER II.
Evadne, like the Vicar of Wakefield, was by nature a lover of happy
human faces, and she could be playful herself on occasion; but she had
little if any of the saving sense of humor.
Her habit was to take everything au grand serieux, and to consider it.
When other people were laughing she would be gravely observant, as if
she were solving a problem; and she would sooner have thought of
trying to discover what combination of molecules resulted in a joke,
with a view to benefiting her species by teaching them how to produce
jokes at will, than of trying to be witty herself. She had, too, a quite
irritating trick of remaining, to all outward seeming, stolidly unmoved
by events which were causing an otherwise general commotion; but in
cases of danger or emergency she was essentially swift to act--as on
one occasion, for instance, when the Hamilton House twins were at
Fraylingay.
The twins had arrived somewhat late in the married lives of their
parents, and had been welcomed as angel visitants, under which fond
delusion they were christened respectively Angelica and Theodore.
Before they were well out of their nurse's arms, however, society, with
discernment, had changed Theodore's name to Diavolo, but "Angelica"
was sanctioned, the irony being obvious.
The twins were alike in appearance, but not nearly so much so as twins
usually are. It would have been quite easy to distinguish them apart,
even if one had not been dark and the other fair, and for this mercy
everybody connected with them had reason to be thankful, for as soon
as they reached the age of active indiscretion they would certainly have
got themselves mixed if they could. Angelica was the dark one, and she
was also the elder, taller, stronger, and wickeder of the two, the
organizer and commander of every expedition. Before they were five
years old everybody about the place was upon the alert, both in
self-defence and also to see that the twins did not kill themselves. Bars
of iron had to be put on the upstairs windows to prevent them making
ladders of the traveller's joy and