Cranford Page #4

								

careworn expression on her face, and looked as if the gaiety of youth had
long faded out of sight.  Even when young she must have been plain and
hard-featured.  Miss Jessie Brown was ten years younger than her sister,
and twenty shades prettier.  Her face was round and dimpled.  Miss
Jenkyns once said, in a passion against Captain Brown (the cause of which
I will tell you presently), “that she thought it was time for Miss Jessie
to leave off her dimples, and not always to be trying to look like a
child.”  It was true there was something childlike in her face; and there
will be, I think, till she dies, though she should live to a hundred.
Her eyes were large blue wondering eyes, looking straight at you; her
nose was unformed and snub, and her lips were red and dewy; she wore her
hair, too, in little rows of curls, which heightened this appearance.  I
do not know whether she was pretty or not; but I liked her face, and so
did everybody, and I do not think she could help her dimples.  She had
something of her father’s jauntiness of gait and manner; and any female
observer might detect a slight difference in the attire of the two
sisters—that of Miss Jessie being about two pounds per annum more
expensive than Miss Brown’s.  Two pounds was a large sum in Captain
Brown’s annual disbursements.

Such was the impression made upon me by the Brown family when I first saw
them all together in Cranford Church.  The Captain I had met before—on
the occasion of the smoky chimney, which he had cured by some simple
alteration in the flue.  In church, he held his double eye-glass to his
eyes during the Morning Hymn, and then lifted up his head erect and sang
out loud and joyfully.  He made the responses louder than the clerk—an
old man with a piping feeble voice, who, I think, felt aggrieved at the
Captain’s sonorous bass, and quivered higher and higher in consequence.

On coming out of church, the brisk Captain paid the most gallant
attention to his two daughters.  He nodded and smiled to his
acquaintances; but he shook hands with none until he had helped Miss
Brown to unfurl her umbrella, had relieved her of her prayer-book, and
had waited patiently till she, with trembling nervous hands, had taken up
her gown to walk through the wet roads.

I wonder what the Cranford ladies did with Captain Brown at their
parties.  We had often rejoiced, in former days, that there was no
gentleman to be attended to, and to find conversation for, at the
card-parties.  We had congratulated ourselves upon the snugness of the
evenings; and, in our love for gentility, and distaste of mankind, we had
almost persuaded ourselves that to be a man was to be “vulgar”; so that
when I found my friend and hostess, Miss Jenkyns, was going to have a
party in my honour, and that Captain and the Miss Browns were invited, I
wondered much what would be the course of the evening.  Card-tables, with
green baize tops, were set out by daylight, just as usual; it was the
third week in November, so the evenings closed in about four.  Candles,
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