But, save on these and a few similar occasions and conditions,
gentlewomen avoid an Inn of Court as they would a barrack-yard, unless
they have secured the special attendance of at least one member of the
society. The escort of a barrister or student, alters the case. What
barrister, young or old, cannot recall mirthful eyes that, with quick
shyness, have turned away from his momentary notice, as in answer to the
rustling of silk, or stirred by sympathetic consciousness of women's
noiseless presence, he has raised his face from a volume of reports, and
seen two or three timorous girls peering through the golden haze of a
London morning, into the library of his Inn? What man, thus drawn away
for thirty seconds from prosaic toil, has not in that half minute
remembered the faces of happy rural homes,--has not recalled old days
when his young pulses beat cordial welcome to similar intruders upon the
stillness of the Bodleian, or the tranquil seclusion of Trinity library?
What occupant of dreary chambers in the Temple, reading this page,
cannot look back to a bright day, when young, beautiful, and pure as
sanctity, Lilian, or Kate, or Olive, entered his room radiant with
smiles, delicate in attire, and musical with gleesome gossip about
country neighbors, and the life of a joyous home?
Seldom does a Templar of the present generation receive so fair and
innocent a visitor. To him the presence of a gentlewoman in his court,
is an occasion for ingenious conjecture; encountered on his staircase
she is a cause of lively astonishment. His guests are men, more or less
addicted to tobacco; his business callers are solicitors and their
clerks; in his vestibule the masculine emissaries of tradesmen may
sometimes be found--head-waiters from neighboring taverns, pot-boys from
the 'Cock' and the 'Rainbow.' A printer's devil may from time to time
knock at his door. But of women--such women as he would care to mention
to his mother and sisters--he sees literally nothing in his dusty,
ill-ordered, but not comfortless rooms. He has a laundress, one of a
class on whom contemporary satire has been rather too severe.
Feminine life of another sort lurks in the hidden places of the law
colleges, shunning the gaze of strangers by daylight; and even when it
creeps about under cover of night, trembling with a sense of its own
incurable shame. But of this sad life, the bare thought of which sends a
shivering through the frame of every man whom God has blessed with a
peaceful home and wholesome associations, nothing shall be said in this
page.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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