ᴵ I must acknowledge here a debt to Mr. Ruskin.
Giles Cuthbert had fought through few difficulties, had mastered few oppositions. His had been a smooth and leisurely existence; hard duties had not come to him as a necessity; and he had not turned aside to seek them for the sake of others. The consequent growth of character was easy, self-satisfying, pleasant in many respects, but by no means great.
Jean had been surrounded from babyhood by a far more embracing environment, had been compelled habitually to march in the face of her own inclinations, had had to wrestle through countless oppositions. Instead of finding all difficulties cleared away from her path, she had been trained to meet and grapple with them. The resisting vigour of her growth was gradually shaping a woman's character of fine outlines, pure, straightforward, self-denying—such a growth as could never have resulted from a spoilt and cosseted existence.
Perhaps the very contrast between the two drew them together. Jean liked Cuthbert despite his laziness, which was, after all, more mental than bodily. He was ready enough for physical exertion, if an adequate object lay ahead. It was steady work from which he turned with loathing; work which had to be done, whatever his passing mood might be. He was quaint, amusing, and full of fun. Jean had never before laughed to such an extent; indeed, when once it becomes an admitted fact that somebody is funny, very little wit is needed to set people's risible muscles in motion.
She liked Mr. Cuthbert, certainly. Not as she liked Jem; not as she liked Cyril; not with liking to be named beside her love for Oswald; still, she found him a pleasant companion. Of course he was ages older than herself; why, he actually had a grey hair or two visible. Jean set him down loosely in her girlish mind as "somewhere about forty or fifty," which to a girl not yet seventeen, sounds venerable. On the whole, she was inclined to regard him as a species of adopted uncle, much nearer to her father than to herself in standing.
Mrs. Trevelyan, knowing Giles to lack about fifteen years of the fifty, did not view matters in precisely the same light.
"To be sure he is almost twenty years older than Jean," she thought; "and that is a great deal even on the right side. Jean is such a child too. It would be absurd to think of anything at present. But some day, three or four years hence—if Giles is not married then, I don't see why it should be impossible. Such a wife as Jean, might be the making of Giles. If anybody could ever get him to work, it would be some one like Jean—always busy. If not, there is no reason why they should not live comfortably on fifteen hundred a year. It sounds like wealth to me! Only of course, Giles could not get quite so many waist-coats, or have such very expensive cigars. He seems taken with the child; and Jean is friendly with him." Mrs. Trevelyan smiled contentedly over her little castle in the air. "I shall write and tell Stewart how well she is looking. He really must let me keep her six weeks or two months now she is here."
Five weeks at the Cottage! Jean could better have believed in five months. The novel ideas and events of each day in Wufflestone lengthened it out to her mental sensations, while each hour flew with speed.
Everything here was different from home. The little dainty house and garden; the dilettante manner of living; the slow meals; the placid tempers; the abundant leisure; the dearth of needlework; the absence of fault-finding; the supply of new books—all these were unwonted and for the time charming.
Dearly as Jean loved Dulveriford Rectory, and the associations of her childhood, she was of too vivid and malleable a nature not to rejoice in the new knowledge springing from now surroundings. Jean learnt more of ease, of freedom, of frank girlish simplicity in those weeks, than in all her previous life. She learnt to hold her own in good-humoured argument; to stand being laughed at, and sometimes even to make others laugh; to be mistress of herself, not alone in action but also in manner. Rigid reserve was fast thawing, and she allowed herself to be affectionate to Mrs. Trevelyan.