“Save yourself the trouble, my dear friend!” said Vivian; “I shall set all that upon a right footing immediately, by speaking of the report at once to some of the family. I was going to rise to explain this morning, when I was with Lady Glastonbury; but I felt a sort of delicacy—it was an awkward time—and at that moment somebody came into the room.”
“Ay,” said Russell, “you are just like the hero of a novel, stopped from saying what he ought to say by somebody’s coming into the room.—Awkward time! Take care you don’t sacrifice yourself at last to these awkwardnesses and this sort of delicacies. I have still my fears that you will get into difficulties about Lady Sarah.”
Vivian could not help laughing at what he called his friend’s absurd fears.
“If you are determined, my dear Russell, at all events to fear for me, I’ll suggest to you a more reasonable cause of dread. Suppose I should fall desperately in love with Lady Julia!—I assure you there’s some danger of that. She is really very handsome and very graceful; uncommonly clever and eloquent—as to the rest, you know her—what is she?”
“All that you have said, and more. She might be made any thing—every thing; an ornament to her sex—an honour to her country—were she under the guidance of persons fit to direct great powers and a noble character; but yet I cannot, Vivian, as your friend, recommend her to you as a wife.”
“I am not thinking of her as a wife,” said Vivian: “I have not had time to think of her at all yet. But you said, just now, that in good hands she might be made every thing that is good and great. Why not by a husband, instead of a governess? and would not you call mine good hands?”
“Good, but not steady—not at all the husband fit to guide such a woman. He must be a man not only of superior sense, but of superior strength of mind.”
Vivian was piqued by this remark, and proceeded to compare the fitness of his character to such a character as Lady Julia’s. Every moment he showed more curiosity to hear further particulars of her disposition; of the different characters of her governesses, and of all her relations; but Russell refused to say more. He had told him what he was called upon, as his friend, to reveal; he left the rest to Vivian’s own observation and judgment. Vivian set himself to work to observe and judge with all his might.
He soon perceived that all Russell had told him of the mismanagement of Lady Julia’s education was true. In this house there were two parties, each in extremes, and each with their systems and practice carried to the utmost excess. The partisans of the old and the new school were here to be seen at daggers-drawing. Lady Glastonbury, abhorrent of what she termed modern philosophy, and classing under that name almost all science and literature, especially all attempts to cultivate the understanding of women, had, with the assistance of her double, Miss Strictland, brought up Lady Sarah in all the ignorance and all the rigidity of the most obsolete of the old school; she had made Lady Sarah precisely like herself; with virtue, stiff, dogmatical, and repulsive; with religion, gloomy and puritanical; with manners, cold and automatic. In the course of eighteen years, whilst Lady Glistonbury went on, like clock-work, the same round, punctual to the letter but unfeeling of the spirit of her duties, she contrived, even by the wearisome method of her minuted diary of education, to make her house odious to her husband. Some task, or master, or hour of lesson, continually, and immitigably plagued him: he went abroad for amusement, and found dissipation. Thus, by her unaccommodating temper, and the obstinacy of her manifold virtues, she succeeded in alienating the affections of her husband. In despair he one day exclaimed,
“Ah que de vertus vous me faites haïr;”