"I suppose, my dear," replied my mother reflectively and perhaps thinking of my father in his study, over his Paper and Hops, "it is only that in life that is really worth doing."
"Then," I said sagely, "I suspects that's how Mullings does the garden, mamma."
Long before Miss Fenne's and the bishop's visitation my mother had set about teaching me in earnest. A governess—a Miss Perry—was our first experiment. Alas, apart from her tendency to quinsy, it was I who was found wanting. She complained of the strain on her nerves. My mother feared that quinsy was catching; and Miss Perry had no successor. Reading was always a difficulty. My father bought me as tiny old books as could be found, including a dwarf Bible, a midget Pickering Shakespeare, and a grammar (with a menagerie for frontispiece) from which I learned that "irony is a figure which intends the reverse of what it speaks, and under the masque of praise, conceals the most biting satyr"; and the following stanza:—
Hail Energeia! hail my native tongue
Concisely full, and musically strong;
Thou with the pencil hold'st a glorious strife,
And paint'st the passions equal to the life.
My mother agreed that strung would be preferable to "strong," and explained that "the passions" did not signify merely ill-temper; while, if I pecked over-nicely at my food, my father would cry "Hail Energeia!" a challenge which rarely failed to persuade me to set to.
My grandfather sent me other pygmy books from Paris, including a minute masterpiece of calligraphy, Une Anthologie de Chansons pour une Minuscule Aimante et Bien-aimée par P. de R. These I could easily carry about with me. I soon learned to accustom my arms and shoulders to bulkier and more cumbrous volumes. My usual method with a common-sized book was to prop it up towards the middle of the table and then to seat myself at the edge. The page finished, I would walk across and turn over a fresh leaf. Thus in my solitude I studied my lessons and read again and again my nursery favourites, some of them, I gather, now undeservedly out of fashion.
Perhaps even better than fiction or folk-tales, I liked books of knowledge.