“I don’t think I am the least like my darling mother,” I said, “for she was beautiful.”
“And don’t you remember her?”
“I don’t remember her. If she were alive I should be quite a different sort of girl. But oh, Hermione! sometimes at night I think of her just when I am dropping off to sleep. She comes to me when I am asleep. To think of any girl having a mother! Oh, it must be the height of bliss and of joy!”
Hermione stared at me for a minute; then she said, “I don’t understand. I love my father best.”
“Do you?” I said, a little shocked.
“Of course you cannot possibly love your mother’s memory as you do your father, for he is such a great man—a man whom all the world is proud of.”
“But he is only a teacher in a school,” I could not help saying.
“He could be anything; but he will not leave the school. He loves to instruct the boys. But it isn’t for his scholastic work he is known; it is because he is himself, and—and because of those wonderful lectures, so many of which are published. He lectures also at the Royal Society, and he writes pamphlets which set the greatest thinkers all agog. Oh, I should be proud of him if I were you!”
“I am glad,” I said. I knew that I loved the Professor dearly. Had I not all my life sacrificed myself for his sake, as every one else had also done?
Hermione said after a pause, “Miss Donnithorne told me that you were—”