The Heavenly Twins (Victorian Feminist Novel). Grand Sarah

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      "Then you'll be cutting off your nose to vex your face," said Angelica.

      Diavolo caught up a piece of bread and butter to throw at her; but she held up her hand, crying: "I appeal to the Peace Angel!"

      "I forgot," said Diavolo, transferring the bread to his plate.

      The children studied the tutor during tea.

      He was a man of thirty, somewhat careworn about the eyes, but with an excessively kind and pleasant face, clean shaven; and thick, reddy-brown hair. He was above the middle height, a little stooped at the shoulders, but of average strength.

      "I like the look of you," said Angelica frankly.

      "Thank you," he answered, smiling.

      "And I vote for a permanent arrangement," she said, looking at Diavolo.

      He was just then hidden behind a huge slice of bread, biting it, but he nodded intelligently.

      The permanent arrangement referred to was to have the tutor to tea, and he agreed, wisely stipulating, however, that the presence of the Peace Angel should also be permanent. He even tried to persuade the twins to invite him to lessons; but that they firmly declined.

      "You'll like being our tutor, I think," Diavolo observed during this first tea.

      "He will if we like him," said Angelica significantly.

      "Are we going to?" Diavolo asked.

      "Yes, I think so," she answered, taking another good look at Mr. Ellis. "I like the look of that red in his hair."

      "Now, isn't that a woman's reason?" Diavolo exclaimed, appealing to Mr.

       Ellis.

      "Yes, it is," said Angelica, preparing to defend it by shuffling a note-book out of her pocket, and ruffling the leaves over: "Listen to this"—and she read—"'A tinge of red in the hair denotes strength and energy of character and good staying power.' We don't want a muff for a tutor, do we? There are born muffs enough in the family without importing them. And a woman's reason is always a good one, as men might see if they'd only stop chattering and listen to it."

      "It mayn't be well expressed, but it will bear examination," Mr. Ellis suggested.

      "Do you like being a tutor?" Diavolo.

      "It depends on whom I have to teach."

      "If you're a good fellow, you'll have a nice time here—on the whole—I hope, sir," Angelica observed. "But why are you a tutor?"

      "To earn my living," Mr. Ellis answered, smiling again.

      The children remembered this, and when they were having tea under the shadow of the supposititious Peace Angel's wing, after the first occasion on which, when the tutor tried to separate them during a fight at lessons, they had turned simultaneously and attacked him, they made it the text of some recommendations. He expressed a strong objection to having manual labour imposed upon him as well as his other work: but they maintained that if only he had called the affray "a struggle for daily bread" or "a fight for a livelihood," he would quite have enjoyed it; and they further suggested that such diversion must be much more interesting than being a mere commonplace tutor who only taught lessons. They could not understand why a fight was not as much fun for him as for them, and thought him unreasonable when they found he was not to be persuaded to countenance that way of varying the monotony. Not that there was ever much monotony in the neighbourhood of the Heavenly Twins; they managed to introduce variety into everything, and their quickness of action, when both were roused, was phenomenal. One day while at work they saw a sparrow pick up a piece of bread, take it to the roof-tree of an angle of the house visible from the schoolroom window, drop it, and chase it as it fell; and the twins had made a bet as to which would beat, bird or bread, quarrelled because they could not agree as to which had bet on bird and which on bread, and boxed each other's ears almost before the race was over.

      Mr. Ellis, although continually upon his guard, was not by any means always a match for them. Over and over again he found that his caution had been fanned to sleep by flattering attentions, while traps were being laid for him with the most innocent air in the world, as on one occasion when Diavolo betrayed him into a dissertation on the consistency of the Scriptures, and Angelica asked him to kindly show her how to reconcile Prov. viii. 2: "For wisdom is better than rubies; and all the things that may be desired are not be compared to it," with Eccles. i. 18: "For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow."

      His way with them was admirable, however, and he completely won their hearts. The thing that they respected him for most was the fact that he took in Punch on his own account, and could show you a lot of things in it that you could never have discovered yourself, as Angelica said, and read bits in a way that made them seem ever so much funnier than when you read them; and could tell you who drew the pictures the moment he looked at them—so that "Punch Day" came to be looked forward to by the children as one of the pleasantest events of the week. Lessons were suspended the moment the paper arrived, if they had been good; but when they were naughty Mr. Ellis put the paper in his pocket, and that was the greatest punishment he could inflict upon them—the only one that ever made them sulk. They would be good for hours in advance to earn the right of having Punch shown to them the moment it came. And it was certainly by means of his intelligent interpretation of it that their tutor managed to cultivate their tastes in many ways, and give them true ideas of art, and the importance of art, at the outset, and also of ethics. He was as careful of Angelica's physical as of her mental education, being himself strongly imbued by the then new idea that a woman should have the full use of her limbs, lungs, heart, and every other organ and muscle, so that life might be a pleasure to her and not a continual exertion. He had a strong objection to the artificial waist, and impressed the beauty of Tenniel's classical purity of figure upon the children by teaching them to appreciate the contrast it presents to the bulging vulgarities made manifest by Keene; and showed them also that while Du Maurier depicted with admirable artistic interpretation the refined surroundings and attenuated forms of women as they are, Linley Sambourne, that master of lovely line, pointed the moral by drawing women as they should be. There was nothing conventional about the Heavenly Twins, and it was therefore easy to make a good impression upon them in this direction, and, the tutor soon had a practical proof of his success which must have been eminently satisfactory if a trifle embarrassing.

      The children were out on the lawn in front of the house one afternoon when a lady arrived to call upon their mother. They were struck by her appearance as she descended from her carriage, and followed her into the drawing room to have a good look at her. She was one of those heroic women who have the constancy to squeeze their figures in beyond the Y shape, which is the commonest deformity, to that of the hourglass which bulges out more above and below the line of compression.

      There were a good many other people in the room, whom the Heavenly Twins saluted politely; and then they sat down opposite to the object of their interest and gazed at her.

      "Why are you tied so tight in the middle?" Angelica asked at last in a voice that silenced everybody else in the room. "Doesn't it hurt? I mean to have a good figure when I grow up, like the Venus de Medici, you know. I can show you a picture of her, if you like. She hasn't a stitch on her."

      "She looks awfully nice, though," said Diavolo, "and Angelica thinks she'd be able to eat more with that kind of figure."

      "Yes," Angelica candidly confessed, СКАЧАТЬ