“How do you know?”
“I have been looking at her. Does she beat the children?”
“My dear Carmina! do you think she would be my mother’s governess if she treated the children in that way? Besides, Miss Minerva is too well-bred a woman to degrade herself by acts of violence. Family misfortunes have very materially lowered her position in the world.”
He was reminded, as he said those words, of the time when Miss Minerva had entered on her present employment, and when she had been the object of some little curiosity on his own part. Mrs. Gallilee’s answer, when he once asked why she kept such an irritable woman in the house, had been entirely satisfactory, so far as she herself was concerned: “Miss Minerva is remarkably well informed, and I get her cheap.” Exactly like his mother! But it left Miss Minerva’s motives involved in utter obscurity. Why had this highly cultivated woman accepted an inadequate reward for her services, for years together? Why—to take the event of that morning as another example—after plainly showing her temper to her employer, had she been so ready to submit to a suddenly decreed holiday, which disarranged her whole course of lessons for the week? Little did Ovid think that the one reconciling influence which adjusted these contradictions, and set at rest every doubt that grew out of them, was to be found in himself. Even the humiliation of watching him in his mother’s interest, and of witnessing his devotion to another woman, was a sacrifice which Miss Minerva could endure for the one inestimable privilege of being in Ovid’s company.
Before Carmina could ask any more questions a shrill voice, at its highest pitch of excitement, called her away. Zo had just discovered the most amusing bird in the Gardens—the low comedian of the feathered race—otherwise known as the Piping Crow.
Carmina hurried to the cage as if she had been a child herself. Seeing Ovid left alone, the governess seized her chance of speaking to him. The first words that passed her lips told their own story. While Carmina had been studying Miss Minerva, Miss Minerva had been studying Carmina. Already, the same instinctive sense of rivalry had associated, on a common ground of feeling, the two most dissimilar women that ever breathed the breath of life.
“Does your cousin know much about birds?” Miss Minerva began.
The opinion which declares that vanity is a failing peculiar to the sex is a slander on women. All the world over, there are more vain men in it than vain women. If Ovid had not been one of the exceptions to a general rule among men, or even if his experience of the natures of women had been a little less limited, he too might have discovered Miss Minerva’s secret. Even her capacity for self-control failed, at the moment when she took Carmina’s place. Those keen black eyes, so hard and cold when they looked at anyone else—flamed with an all-devouring sense of possession when they first rested on Ovid. “He’s mine. For one golden moment he’s mine!” They spoke—and, suddenly, the every-day blind was drawn down again; there was nobody present but a well-bred woman, talking with delicately implied deference to a distinguished man.
“So far, we have not spoken of the birds,” Ovid innocently answered.
“And yet you seemed to be both looking at them!” She at once covered this unwary outbreak of jealousy under an impervious surface of compliment. “Miss Carmina is not perhaps exactly pretty, but she is a singularly interesting girl.”