“Peggy Saville is good enough for me, thank you,” said that young lady, with a sudden access of humility. “I have no wish to have my clothes discussed in the public prints. But if you are invited to the Larches to play with your Rosalind, pray don’t consider me! I can stay at home alone. I don’t mind being dull. I can turn my time to good account. Not for the world would I interfere with your pleasure?”
“But P–P–Peggy, dar–ling Peggy, we would not leave you alone!” Mellicent’s eyes were wide with horror, she stretched out entreating hands towards the unresponsive figure. To see Peggy cross and snappish like—any other ordinary mortal was an extraordinary event, and quite alarming to her placid mind. “They will ask you, too, dear! I am sure they will—we will all be asked together!” she cried; but Peggy tossed her head, refusing to be conciliated.
“I shall have a previous engagement. I am not at all sure that they are the sort of people I ought to know,” she said. “My parents are so exclusive! They might not approve of the acquaintance!”
Chapter Ten.
Ambitions!
Although Fräulein had charge over the girls’ education, Mr Asplin reserved to himself the right of superintending their studies and dictating their particular direction. He was so accustomed to training boys for a definite end that he had no patience with the ordinary aimless routine of a girl’s school course, and in the case of his daughters had carefully provided for their different abilities and tastes. Esther was a born student, a clear-headed, hard-thinking girl, who took a delight in wrestling with Latin verbs and in solving problems in Euclid, while she had little or no artistic faculty. He put her through much the same course as his own boys, gave her half an hour’s private lesson on unoccupied afternoons, and cut down the two hours’ practising on the piano to a bare thirty minutes. Esther had pleaded to give up music altogether, on the ground that she had neither love nor skill for this accomplishment, but to this the vicar would not agree.
“You have already spent much time over it, and have passed the worst of the drudgery; it would be folly to lose all you have learnt,” he said. “You may not wish to perform in public, but there are many other ways in which your music may be useful. In time to come you would be sorry if you could not read an accompaniment to a song, play bright airs to amuse children, or hymn tunes to help in a service. Half an hour a day will keep up what you have learned, and so much time you must manage to spare.”
With Mellicent the case was almost exactly opposite. It was a waste of time trying to teach her mathematics, she had not sufficient brain power to grasp them, and if she succeeded in learning a proposition by heart like a parrot, it was only to collapse into helpless tears and protestations when the letters were altered, and, as it seemed to her, the whole argument changed thereby.