“But she is still hankering after those confounded Chichesters!” her cousin said to himself, when the girl had left him, in which conclusion he was not far wrong.
With the coming of Miss Osric, the “do as you please” system ceased.
Lady Frederica might be lax as regarded solid education. “There’s no need whatsoever to behave as though you are to be a governess, my dear,” she said to Sydney, but she was horrified by the girl’s lack of accomplishments.
“The one and only thing the child can do is to look pretty,” his aunt complained to St. Quentin, “and beauty without style is very little good. Of course, we must be thankful for small mercies—one seldom has big ones to be thankful for—and she might have been fat and podgy! But what in the world those doctor people were about not to give her drill and calisthenic lessons, I can’t think!”
“There were herds of them, I fancy,” said her nephew. “Whenever Sydney mentions them, which isn’t seldom, she springs a new one upon me. They would make an excellent third volume to the Pillars of the House. I don’t suppose there was overmuch cash to spare for accomplishments.”
“I never can think why it is that those people who cannot afford it always have such enormous families,” pursued the lady.
“If we had done our duty by Sydney as we should, there would have been one less all these eighteen years,” her nephew suggested, and Lady Frederica changed the subject, as she always did when St. Quentin had what she called a “conscientious craze.”
“It’s your health makes you talk like that, my dear boy,” she declared. “You are really getting quite ridiculous about Sydney!”
The round of accomplishments now began in good earnest.