Miss Devereux, spinster

The morning-room which she occupied was better fitted for summer than winter uses. Indian matting covered the floor; Indian drapery clothed the walls; light cane chairs of foreign make were scattered among tables no less fragile. This being June, a fringe of Gloire de Dijon roses peered in at the open French window. Had it been December, the morning-room would have been forsaken.

Sybella Devereux had taken one of the slight chairs, beside one of the flimsy tables. A writing-case was open, and two or three letters were outspread.

Few would have guessed her at first sight to be within a few months of forty. She had lived the sheltered life of many English daughters in easy circumstances—a life of moderate occupation, of small trouble or responsibility. Sybella had taken life as she found it. She was not a woman to carve out a career for herself in the face of circumstances. She counted herself delicate, and liked to be comfortable. If any latent force of character had existed in her originally, circumstances had tended to smother rather than to draw it out.

From babyhood she had been thought of, guarded, cared for, directed, never left to decide for herself. As an arm or leg will wither if tied up and not used, so the power of mental decision had withered in her from lack of exercise.

Years had trickled past in monotonous ease, and her girlhood had lingered long after the lawful stage, "dying hard." It was ample time for Sybella to be settling down into old maidhood; at least according to all laws of fiction. She did not, however, yet count herself to be an old maid.

There were no lines of grey in her hair; and if the cheeks were rather thin, rumpling into suspicious ridges when she smiled, that was only because she had always been "so delicate, you know!" She wore slight mourning for a sister-in-law, the wife of her only brother, who was expected home shortly from India; otherwise she would not have hesitated to sport a white dress with blue ribbons, as suited to the season.

That which marked Sybella as apart from the young ladyhood of the day was not so much any definite look of middle-age; it was rather a certain sentimentality, a self-conscious bashfulness, belonging entirely to a past generation. Girls of sixteen and eighteen growing up around Sybella were twenty times as practical, as independent, as much at their ease, as was she.

Sybella's father, Sir John Devereux, a kind-hearted and placid old gentleman, who, like his daughter, took life much as he found it, had died two years earlier. He left his small property of Ripley Brow, with the Baronetcy, to his son Theodore, a successful Indian civilian, stipulating only that his widowed sister, Mrs. Willoughby, for thirty-five years his companion and stay, should live there during the rest of her life. Theodore offered no objections to this proviso. Until the loss of his own wife broke him down, and destroyed the charm of India, he much preferred to stay there, leaving Ripley Brow to the management of his aunt and sister.

Or, rather, of his aunt. Sybella was the managed, not the manager. The loss of her father made little difference in this respect. She was still hedged round with care. She could still go on with her mild circle of occupations—her attentions to pet plants, her scraps of useless fancy work, her chit-chat calls upon neighbours, her epistolary gushes to bosom friends. The circle of occupations included also futile attempts at painting, fitful readings and copyings of poetry, dilettante dippings into social questions beyond her depth, and through all an unswerving devotion to her own health.