But one day in the schoolroom was enough to quench hope from that quarter. The education bestowed on her by her father had been partial; but what she knew, she knew thoroughly. Her Latin and arithmetic and Euclid were all good; her knowledge of geography and English history made Tommy feel quite faint. Of French and German she was wholly ignorant, and could not pick out the notes on the piano.
But in all respects she knew enough to know that Tommy knew nothing. All the morning the governess was experiencing the annoyance which Mr. Cooper had known, feeling the clear eyes upon her full of judgment.
The leading point in the education of Mr. Cooper's girls was that they should have no judgment. They were always to be content to accept what they were told. When they came in contact with actual life, their only standard would be that such and such a thing was according to, or differed from, what they were used to.
"I am a great believer in the power of habit," the vicar was wont to say. Poor soul! Habit had moulded him with a vengeance; he might be excused for thinking highly of its powers over the human intelligence.
Melicent was a problem to her cousins. They were fascinated by her, as the weak must always be by the strong; but they resented her aloofness. And they were simply bewildered by her tastes.
Tommy was—sub rosâ, of course—reading aloud to them a thrilling serial from the Daily Looking-glass. It was called "Phyllis and the Duke," and was a story of the pure love of that gallant nobleman, the Duke of Mendip, for his sister's governess, the lovely Phyllis de Forester; of the machinations of his envious cousin, Captain the Honourable Percy Blagdon; and of how Phyllis turned out to be the unacknowledged daughter of an Earl, and the true owner of the Honourable Percy's estates. They had reached a thrilling chapter, in which the trembling young governess went to interview a clairvoyante, in a mystic kind of house in St. John's Wood, to ascertain what had become of her chivalrous lover. Tommy was uneasy when the story took this turn. She did not like the sound of a mysterious house in St. John's Wood, and began to reflect, with resentment, that nowadays you could not trust even the feuilleton of a halfpenny journal to be wholly inoffensive. But the writer was perfectly equal to the occasion, and knew his public to a nicety—or might we say, to a nastiness? The clairvoyante turned out to be Phyllis's deeply injured mamma, a young lady who would on no account have gone without the indispensable marriage ceremony; and the gentleman who exploited her, and "ran" the mysterious house, was her own brother, Phyllis's uncle, who long had sought his beloved niece in vain.
"I can't think why you don't like it," sighed Gwen, whose eyes were kindled, her cheeks aglow.
"It is so unreal and so silly," said her cousin calmly. "People don't go on like that. I like a story that makes you forget that it's not true."
"Such as what?" they asked her.
After reflection—"Such as 'Silas Marner,'" she said.