coming week, even if the most glorious things were going to happen, wonderful only because it was so amazing to be alive at all ... That was too much ... these girls did not consciously feel like that; perhaps partly because they had a brother, were the kind of girls who would have at least one brother, choking things back by obliviousness, but breezy and useful in many ways. It's good to have brothers; but there is something they kill, if they are in the majority, absolutely, so that one girl with many brothers rarely becomes a woman, but can sometimes be a nice understanding jolly sort of man. Brothers without sisters are worse off than sisters without brothers; unless they are very gifted ... in which case they are really, as people say of the poets, more than three parts women. But Sundays, for all girls, were in a way the same. And though these girls did not reason and were densely unconscious of the challenge embodied in their religion, and enjoyed being snobbish without knowing it, or knowing the meaning and good of snobbishness, their unconsciousness was harmless, and the huge Sunday things they lived in, held and steered their lives, making, in England, in them and in all of their kind, a world that the clever people who laughed at them had never been inside.... _They_ did not laugh, except the busy enviable blissful laughter permitted by God, from the midst of their lives, about nothing at all. They thought liberals vulgar--mostly chapel people; and socialists mad. But in the midst of their conservatism was something that could never die, and that these other people did not seem to possess.... And the best, most Charlotte Yonge part of the story, was the arrival of Mr. Leyton and his cousin, whilst these girls were still at home amongst their Sundays; and the opening out, for two of them at once, of a future; with the past behind it undivided. And they had suddenly asked her to their picnic. And she had been back, for the whole of that summer's afternoon, in the world of women; and the forgotten things, that had first driven her away from it, had emerged again, no longer mysterious, and with more of meaning in them, so that she had been able to achieve an appearance of conformity, and had felt that they regarded her not with the adoration or half-pitying dislike she had had from women in the past, but as a woman, though only as a weird sort of female who needed teaching. They had no kind of fear of her; not because they were massed there in strength. Any one of them, singly, would, she had felt, have been equal to her in any sort of circumstances; her superior; a rather impatient but absolutely loyal and chivalrous guide in the lonely exclusive feminine life.