“The King is dead—long live the King!” The Jampot as a power in the Cole family has ceased to be.
The day following the Jampot's departure offered up the news that, for the first time in the history of the Coles, there was to be a governess. The word “governess” had an awful sound, and the children trembled with a mixture of delight and terror. Jeremy pretended indifference.
“It's only another woman,” he said. “She'll be like the Jampot—only, a lady, so she won't be able to punish us as the Jampot could.”
I expect that Mr. and Mrs. Cole had great difficulty in finding anyone who would do. Thirty years ago governesses were an incapable race, and belonged too closely either to the Becky Sharp or the Amelia type to be very satisfactory. It was then that the New Woman was bursting upon the scene, but she was not to be found amongst the governesses. No one in Polchester had learnt yet to cycle in rational costume, it was several years before the publication of “The Heavenly Twins,” and Mr. Trollope's Lilys and Lucys were still considered the ideal of England's maidenhood. Mrs. Cole, therefore, had to choose between idiotic young women and crabbed old maids, and she finally chose an old maid. I don't think that Miss Jones was the very best choice that she could have made, but time was short. Jeremy, aided by Hamlet, was growing terribly independent, and Mr. Cole had neither the humour nor the courage to deal with him. No, Miss Jones was not ideal, but the Dean had strongly recommended her. It is true that the Dean had never seen her, but her brother, with whom she had lived for many years, had once been the Dean's curate. It was true that he had been a failure as a curate, but that made the Dean the more anxious to be kind now to his memory, he—Mr. Jones—having just died of general bad-temper and selfishness.
Miss Jones, buried during the last twenty years in the green depths of a Glebeshire valley, found herself now, at the age of fifty, without friends, without money, without relations. She thought that she would be a governess.
The Dean recommended her, Mrs. Cole approved of her birth, education and sobriety, Mr. Cole liked the severity of her countenance when she came to call, and she was engaged.
“Jeremy needs a tight hand,” said Mr. Cole. “It's no use having a young girl.”
“Miss Jones easily escapes that charge,” said Uncle Samuel, who had met her in the hall.
The children were prepared to be good. Jeremy felt that it was time to take life seriously. He put away his toy village, scolded Hamlet for eating Mary's pincushion, and dragged out his dirty exercise-book in which he did sums.
“I do hate sums!” he said, with a sigh, regarding the hideous smudges of thumbs and tears that scored the page. “I shall never understand anything about them.”