‘That depends on how it is kept. And may I ask, do you mean also to dispense with staircases?’
‘Oh! I forgot. But do you really mean to say that I can never carry out my improvements, and that these people must live all herded together till everybody is dead?’
‘Not quite that,’ said the Admiral, laughing; ‘but most improvements require patience and a little experience of the temper and habits of the people. There are cottages worse than these. I think two of them have four rooms, and the Wests and Porters do not require so much. If you built one or two elsewhere, and moved the people into them, or waited for a vacant one, you might carry out some of your plans—gradually.’
‘And my fountain?’
‘I am not quite sure, but I am afraid your cottages are on that stratum where you could not bring the water without great expense.’
Arthurine controlled herself enough for a civil ‘Good-morning!’ but she shed tears as she walked home and told her pitying mother that she was thwarted on every side, and that nobody could comprehend her.
The meetings for German reading were, however, contrived chiefly—little as Arthurine guessed it—by the influence of Bessie Merrifield. The two Greville girls and Mr. Doyle’s sister, together with the doctor’s young wife, two damsels from the next parish, and a friend or two that the Arthurets had made at Bonchamp, formed an imposing circle—to begin.
‘Oh, not on Wilhelm Tell!’ cried Arthurine. ‘It might as well be the alphabet at once.’
However, the difficulties in the way of books, and consideration for general incompetency, reduced her to Wilhelm Tell, and she began with a lecture first on Schiller, and then upon Switzerland, and on the legend; but when Bessie Merrifield put in a word of such history and criticisms as were not in the High School Manual, she was sure everything else must be wrong—‘Fraülein Blümenbach never said so, and she was an admirable German scholar.’
Miss Doyle went so far as to declare she should not go again to see Bessie Merrifield so silenced, sitting by after the first saying nothing, but only with a little laugh in her eyes.