"I am not going to be peculiar; but I don't want to forget all I have learned with you," said Lettice, quickly.
"You have learned too much already," said the autocrat, whose views concerning women's education had developed since his short stay in Cambridge. "Girls don't want Latin and Greek; they want music and needlework, and all that sort of thing. I don't want my sister to be a blue-stocking."
Lettice felt that her lot in life ought not to be settled for her simply as Sydney's sister—that she had an individuality of her own. But the feeling was too vague to put into words; and after Syndey had left her, in obedience to a call from his father, she sat on in the long, low room with its cushioned window-seats and book-covered walls—the dear old room in which she had spent so many happy hours with her teacher and her fellow-pupil—and wondered what would become of her when Sydney was really gone; whether all those happy days were over, and she must henceforth content herself with a life at Mrs. Campion's side, where it was high treason to glance at any book that was neither a devotional work nor a novel. Lettice loved her mother, but the prospect did not strike her as either brilliant or cheering.
It was the beginning, although at first she knew it not, of a new era in her life. Her happy childhood was over; she was bound henceforth to take up the heavy burden which custom lays on the shoulders of so many women: the burden of trivial care, unchanging routine, petty conventionalities—
"Heavy as frost and deep almost as life."
Sydney went out into the world to fight; Lettice sat in idleness at home; and society, as well as the rector and his wife, judged this division of labor to be fair and right. But to Lettice, whose courage was high and whose will and intellect were strong, it seemed a terrible injustice that she might not fight and labor too. She longed for expansion: for a wider field and sharper weapons wherewith to contest the battle; and she longed in vain. During her father's lifetime it became more and more impossible for her to leave home. She was five-and-twenty before she breathed a larger air than that of Angleford.
CHAPTER III.
PROGRESS.
In due time, Sydney proceeded to Cambridge, and Lettice was left alone. The further development of brother and sister can scarcely be understood without a retrospective glance at their own and their parents' history.