The morning after Lady Derl took Lewis into her carriage in the park she received three separate notes from female friends demanding that she "divvy up." Knowing women in general and the three in special, she prepared to comply. Often Lewis and his father had been summoned by a scribbled note for pot-luck with Lady Derl; but this time it was a formal invitation, engraved.
Lewis read his card casually. His face lighted up. Leighton read his with deeper perception, and frowned.
"Already!" he grunted. Then he said: "When you've finished breakfast, come to my den. I want to talk to you."
Lewis found his father sitting like a judge on the bench, behind a great oak desk he rarely used. An envelope, addressed, lay before him. He rang for Nelton and sent it out.
"Sit down," he said to Lewis. "Where did you get your education? By education I don't mean a knowledge of knives, forks, and fish-eaters. That's from Ann Leighton, of course. Nor do I mean the power of adding two to two or reciting A B C D, etc. By education a gentleman means skill in handling life."
"And have I got it?" asked Lewis, smiling.
"You meet life with a calmness and deftness unusual in a boy," said
Leighton, gravely.
"I—I don't know," began Lewis. "I've never been educated. By the time I was nine I knew how to read and write and figure a little. After that—you know—I just sat on the hills for years with the goats. I read the Reverend Orme's books, of course."
"What were the books?"
"There weren't many," said Lewis. "There was the Bible, of course. There was a little set of Shakspere in awfully fine print and a set of Walter Scott."