And strive and strain to be good again.”
Poor little Nell,—it was almost pitiful to see how good she tried to be after her escapade. There was absolutely nothing she would not have done for Meg. She begged to be allowed to help in the housekeeping, offered to take the darning of Bunty’s socks and Peter’s terrible stockings as her own particular work, and sternly refrained from looking in her glass when it was not necessary for the straight set of her collar or respectable appearance of her hair.
She consulted Meg as to the best study she could take up—she said she felt ashamed to be so dreadfully ignorant.
“Why, I haven’t read anything better than Jessie Fothergill and Rhoda Broughton this year,” she said, in a tone of stern surprise at herself.
[218]
]Meg suggested the “Essays of Elia,” “The Professor at the Breakfast Table,” “Sesame and Lilies,” Lives of various poets.
“You can go then gradually to something deeper,” she said. “I’m afraid you might be discouraged if you started on anything more solid just yet.”
But Nellie’s zeal was too tremendous for half measures.
During the morning of the day after the dinner party, Meg had occasion to go into the nursery for something or other during Miss Monson’s hours, and with difficulty restrained a smile.
Nellie always studied—or pretended to—at a rickety-legged draught-table in the window. Her working materials hitherto had consisted of a chased silver pen that looked too elegant to write with, an ornamental inkstand with violet and red ink, a box of chocolates, a novel in brown paper covers, “Le Chien,” highly dilapidated, and “Samson Agonistes,” which she was supposed to be studying in detail.
This morning all was changed. There was black ink in the bottles, the silver pen was invisible, and a plain penny red one occupied its place on the stag’s head. No trace of chocolates, no covered fiction at all. Instead, a pile of books selected from the study simply because they were the most solid [219] ]looking and driest on the shelves. The choice had occupied Nellie for almost an hour; if any she took down had spaced matter, light-looking conversations, or broken-up paragraphs she instantly replaced them. She had finally selected and carried to the nursery, to Miss Monson’s incredulous surprise, the following six: “Sartor Resartus,” “The Wealth of Nations,” “Marcus Aurelius,” “Mazzini’s Essays,” the “Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire,” and Johnson’s “Rasselas.”