One day, exactly three weeks after her last visit to my room, as I was sitting with my three pupils in the schoolroom, Lady Alice entered, and began to look on the bookshelves as if she wanted some volume. After a few moments, she turned, and, approaching the table, said to me, in an abrupt, yet hesitating way.
“Mr. Campbell, I cannot spell. How am I to learn?”
I thought for a moment, and replied: “Copy a passage every day, Lady Alice, from some favourite book. Then, if you allow me, I shall be most happy to point out any mistakes you may have made.”
“Thank you, Mr. Campbell, I will; but I am afraid you will despise me, when you find how badly I spell.”
“There is no fear of that,” I rejoined. “It is a mere peculiarity. So long as one can think well, spelling is altogether secondary.”
“Thank you; I will try,” she said, and left the room. Next day, she brought me an old ballad, written tolerably, but in a school-girl’s hand. She had copied the antique spelling, letter for letter.
“This is quite correct,” I said; “but to copy such as this will not teach you properly; for it is very old, and consequently old-fashioned.”
“Is it old? Don’t we spell like that now? You see I do not know anything about it. You must set me a task, then.”
This I undertook with more pleasure than I dared to show. Every day she brought me the appointed exercise, written with a steadily improving hand. To my surprise, I never found a single error in the spelling. Of course, when, advancing a step in the process, I made her write from my dictation, she did make blunders, but not so many as I had expected; and she seldom repeated one after correction.
This new association gave me many opportunities of doing more for her than merely teaching her to spell. We talked about what she copied; and I had to explain. I also told her about the writers. Soon she expressed a desire to know something of figures. We commenced arithmetic. I proposed geometry along with it, and found the latter especially fitted to her powers. One by one we included several other necessary branches; and ere long I had four around the schoolroom table—equally my pupils. Whether the attempts previously made to instruct her had been insufficient or misdirected, or whether her intellectual powers had commenced a fresh growth, I could not tell; but I leaned to the latter conclusion, especially after I began to observe that her peculiar remarks had become modified in form, though without losing any of their originality. The unearthliness of her beauty likewise disappeared, a slight colour displacing the almost marbly whiteness of her cheek.