Our Manifold Nature; Stories from Life

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: JANEY, A HUMBLE ADMINISTRATOR. How it happened that Janey could ever have lived and not been in Dickens, I cannot imagine, unless it was that the master was cut off prematurely before he came to her. The nearest approach in his works to the type is Miss Jenny Wren, the dolls' dressmaker; but that small creature was mainly fantastical, whereas our Janey could under no circumstances have been anything but dignified, so simple were her manners, so direct her speech, Bo great her intelligence, so clear her judgment, and so exemplary her patient fortitude under circumstances of peculiar trial. She was one of the best specimens I ever met of that highly complex creature, a true gentlewoman; a being compounded of courage and timidity, strength and weakness, sense, delicacy, refinement, penetration, taste, tact, and a few foibles?though the latter were not innate in Janey's case, I should say, but rather an accretion sown by circumstances, an outcome of the influence of such externals as of necessity surrounded her unusual position, and of the close contact with a number of very diverse people which it entailed. But although I maintain that Janey was a gentlewoman, it would be misleading to call her a lady. Gentlewoman in our day is a title which must be won by estimable qualities; a lady may be any kind of a character, the term merely referring to position and means?those fine feathers which cover many contemptible birds. Janey's position was low in the social scale?she had been a kitchen-maid; and her pedigree was certainly not exalted. It is, however, valuable in its significance to the student of human nature as showing from whence she possibly derived her own good qualities. Her father's family were mostly tenant farmers in a small way, or market gardeners, and had been ...