The Misses Ponsonby speedily came to a conclusion about Catharine, and she was forthwith labelled as a young lady of natural ability, whose education had been neglected, a type perfectly familiar, recurring every quarter, and one with which they were perfectly well able to deal. All the examples they had had before were ticketed in exactly the same terms, and, so classed, there was an end of further distinction. The means taken with Catharine were those which had been taken since the school began, and special attention was devoted to the branches in which she was most deficient, and which she disliked. Her history was deplorable, and her first task, therefore, was what were called dates. A table had been prepared of the kings and queens of England—when they came to the throne, and when they died; and another table gave the years of all the battles. A third table gave the relationship of the kings and queens to each other, and the reasons for succession. All this had to be learned by heart. In languages, also, Catharine was singularly defective. Her French was intolerable and most inaccurate, and of Italian she knew nothing. Her dancing and deportment were so “provincial,” as Miss Adela Ponsonby happily put it, that it was thought better that the dancing and deportment teacher should give her a few private lessons before putting her in a class, and she was consequently instructed alone in the rudiments of the art of entering and leaving a room with propriety, of sitting with propriety on a sofa when conversing, of reading a book in a drawing-room, of acknowledging an introduction, of sitting down to a meal and rising therefrom, and in the use of the pocket-handkerchief. She had particularly shocked the Misses Ponsonby on this latter point, as she was in the habit of blowing her nose energetically, “snorting,” as one of the young ladies said colloquially, but with truth, and the deportment mistress had some difficulty in reducing them to the whisper, which was all that was permitted in the Ponsonby establishment, even in cases of severe cold. On the other hand, in one or two departments she was far ahead of the other girls, particularly in arithmetic and geometry.

It was the practice on Monday morning for the girls to be questioned on the sermons of the preceding Sunday, and a very solemn business it was. The whole school was assembled in the big schoolroom, and Mr. Cardew, both the Misses Ponsonby being present, examined viva voce. One Monday morning, after Catharine had been a month at the school, Mr. Cardew came as usual. He had been preaching the Sunday before on a favourite theme, and his text had been, “So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin,” and the examination at the beginning was in the biography of St. Paul, as this had formed a part of his discourse. No fault was to be found with the answers on this portion of the subject, but presently the class was in some difficulty.

“Can anybody tell me what meaning was assigned to the phrase, ‘The body of this death’?”

No reply.

“Come, you took notes, and one or two interpretations were discarded for that which seemed to be more in accordance with the mind of St. Paul. Miss Arden”—Miss Arden was sitting nearest to Mr. Cardew—“cannot you say?”

Miss Arden shook her ringlets, smiled, and turned a little red, as if she had been complimented by Mr. Cardew’s inquiries after the body of death, and, glancing at her paper, replied—“The death of this body.”

“Pardon me, that was one of the interpretations rejected.”

“This body of death,” said Catharine.

“Quite so.”

Mr. Cardew turned hastily round to the new pupil, whom he had not noticed before, and looked at her steadily for a moment.

“Can you proceed a little and explain what that means?”

Catharine’s voice trembled, but she managed to read from her paper: “It is strikingly after the manner of St. Paul. He opposes the two pictures in him by the strongest words at his command—death and life. One is death, the other is life, and he prays to be delivered from death; not the death of the body, but from death-in-life.”

“Thank you; that is very nearly what I intended.”

Mr. Cardew took tea at the Limes about once a fortnight with Mrs. Cardew. The meal was served in the Misses Ponsonby’s private room, and the girls were invited in turn. About a fortnight after the examination on St. Paul’s theory of human nature, Mr. and Mrs. Cardew came as usual, and Catharine was one of the selected guests. The company sat round the table, and Mrs. Cardew was placed between her husband and Miss Furze. The rector’s wife was a fair-haired lady, with quiet, grey eyes, and regular, but not strikingly beautiful, features. Yet they were attractive, because they were harmonious, and betokened a certain inward agreement. It was a sane, sensible face, but a careless critic might have thought that it betokened an incapability of emotion, especially as Mrs. Cardew had a habit of sitting back in her chair, and generally let the conversation take its own course until it came very chose to her. She had a sober mode of statement and criticism, which was never brilliant and never stupid. It ought to have been most serviceable to her husband, because it might have corrected the exaggeration into which his impulse, talent, and power of pictorial representation were so apt to fall. She had been brought up as an Evangelical, but she had passed through no religious experiences whatever, and religion, in the sense in which Evangelicalism in the Church of England of that day understood it, was quite unintelligible to her. Had she been born a few years later she would have taken to science, and would have done well at it, but at that time there was no outlet for any womanly faculty, much larger in quantity than we are apt to suppose, which has an appetite for exact facts.

Mr. Cardew would have been called a prig by those who did not know him well. He had a trick of starting subjects suddenly, and he very often made his friends very uncomfortable by the precipitate introduction, without any warning, of remarks upon serious matters. Once even, shocking to say, he quite unexpectedly at a tea-party made an observation about God. Really, however, he was not a prig. He was very sincere. He lived in a world of his own, in which certain figures moved which were as familiar to him as common life, and he consequently talked about them. He leaned in front of his wife and said to Catharine—

“Have you read much, Miss Furze?”

“No, very little.”

“Indeed! I should have thought you were a reader. What have you read lately? any stories?”

“Yes, I have read ‘Rasselas.’”

“‘Rasselas’! Have you really? Now tell me what you think of it.”

“Oh! I cannot tell you all.”

“No; it is not fair to put the question in that way. It is necessary to have some training in order to give a proper account of the scope and purpose of a book. Can you select any one part which struck you, and tell me why it struck you?”

“The part about the astronomer. I thought all that is said about the dreadful effects of uncontrolled imagination was so wonderful.”

“Don’t you think those effects are exaggerated?”

She lost herself for a moment, as we have already seen she was in the habit of doing, or rather, she did not lose herself, but everything excepting herself, and she spoke as if nobody but herself were present.

“Not in the least exaggerated. What a horror to pass days in dreaming about one particular thing, and to have no power to wake!”

Her head had fallen a little forward; she suddenly straightened herself; the blood rose in her face, and she looked very confused.

“I should like to preach about Dr. Johnson,” said Mr. Cardew.

“Really, Mr. Cardew,” interposed the elder Miss Ponsonby, “Dr. Johnson is scarcely a sacred subject.”

“I beg your pardon; I do not mean preaching on the Sabbath. I should like to lecture about him. It is a curious thing, Miss Ponsonby, that although Johnson was such a devout Christian, yet in his troubles his remedy is generally nothing but that of the Stoics—courage and patience.”

Nobody answered, and an awkward pause followed. Catharine had not recovered from the shock of self-revelation, and the Misses Ponsonby were uneasy, not because the conversation had taken such an unusual turn, but because a pupil had contributed. Mrs. Cardew, distressed at her husband’s embarrassment, ventured to come to the rescue.

“I think Dr Johnson quite right: when I am in pain, and nothing does me any good, I never have anything to say to myself, excepting that I must just be quiet, wait and bear it.”

This very plain piece of pagan common sense made matters worse. Mr. Cardew seemed vexed that his wife had spoken, and there was once more silence for quite half a minute. Miss Adela Ponsonby then rang the bell, and Catharine, in accordance with rule, left the room.

“Rather a remarkable young woman,” carelessly observed the rector.

“Decidedly!” said both the Misses Ponsonby, in perfect unison.

“She has been much neglected,” continued Miss Ponsonby. “Her manners leave much to be desired. She has evidently not been accustomed to the forms of good society, or to express herself in accordance with the usual practice. We have endeavoured to impress upon her that, not only is much care necessary in the choice of topics of conversation, but in the mode of dealing with them. I thought it better not to encourage any further remarks from her, or I should have pointed out that, if what you say of Dr. Johnson is correct, as I have no doubt it is, considering the party in the church to which he belonged, it only shows that he was unacquainted experimentally with the consolations of religion.”

“Isn’t Mr. Cardew a dear?” asked Miss Arden, when she and Catharine were together.

“I hardly understand what you mean, and I have not known Mr. Cardew long enough to give any opinion upon him.”

“How exasperating you are again! You do know what I mean; but you always pretend never to know what anybody means.”

“I do not know what you mean.”

“Why, isn’t he handsome; couldn’t you doat on him, and fall in love with him?”

“But he’s married.”

“You fearful Catharine! of course he’s married; you do take things so seriously.”

“Well, I’m more in the dark than ever.”

“There you shall stick,” replied Miss Arden, lightly shaking her curls and laughing. “Married!—yes, but they don’t care for one another a straw.”

“Have they ever told you so?”

“How very ridiculous! Cannot you see for yourself?”

“I am not sure: it is very difficult to know whether people really love one another, and often equally difficult to know if they dislike one another.”

“What a philosopher you are! I’ll tell you one thing, though: I believe he has just a little liking for me. Not for his life dare he show it. Oh, my goodness, wouldn’t the fat be in the fire! Wouldn’t there be a flare-up! What would the Ponsonbys do? Polite letter to papa announcing that my education was complete! That’s what they did when Julia Jackson got in a mess. They couldn’t have a scandal: so her education was complete, and home she went. Now the first time we are out for a walk and he passes us and bows, you watch.”

Miss Julia Arden went to sleep directly she went to bed, but Catharine, contrary to her usual custom, lay awake till she heard twelve o’clock strike from St. Mary, Abchurch. She started, and thought that she alone, perhaps, of all the people who lay within reach of those chimes had heard them. Why did she not go to sleep? She was unused to wakefulness, and its novelty surprised her with all sorts of vague terrors. She turned from side to side anxiously while midnight sounded, but she was young, and in ten minutes afterwards she was dreaming. She was mistaken in supposing that she was the only person awake in Abchurch that night. Mrs. Cardew heard the chimes, and over her their soothing melody had no power. When she and her husband left the Limes he broke out at once, with all the eagerness with which a man begins when he has been repeating to himself for some time every word of his grievance—

“I don’t know how it is, Jane, but whenever I say anything I feel you are just the one person on whom it seems to make an impression. You have a trick of repetition, and you manage to turn everything into a platitude. If you cannot do better than that, you might be silent.”

He was right so far, that it is possible by just a touch to convert the noblest sentiment into commonplace. No more than a touch is necessary. The parabolic mirror will reflect the star to a perfect focus. The elliptical mirror, varying from the parabola by less than the breadth of a hair, throws an image which is useless. But Mr. Cardew was far more wrong than he was right. He did not take into account that what his wife said and what she felt might not be the same; that persons, who have no great command over language, are obliged to make one word do duty for a dozen, and that, if his wife was defective at one point, there were in her whole regions of unexplored excellence, of faculties never encouraged, and an affection to which he offered no response. He had not learned the art of being happy with her: he did not know that happiness is an art: he rather did everything he could do to make the relationship intolerable. He demanded payment in coin stamped from his own mint, and if bullion and jewels had been poured before him he would have taken no heed of them.

She said nothing. She never answered him when he was angry with her. It was growing dark as they went home, and the tears came into her eyes and the ball rose in her throat, and her lips quivered. She went back—does a woman ever forget them?—to the hours of passionate protestation before marriage, to the walks together when he caught up her poor phrases and refined them, and helped her to see herself, and tried also to learn what few things she had to teach. It was all the worse because she still loved him so dearly, and felt that behind the veil was the same face, but she could not tear the veil away. Perhaps, as they grew older, matters might become worse, and they might have to travel together estranged down the long, weary path to death. Death! She did not desire to leave him, but she would have lain down in peace to die that moment if he could be made to see her afterwards as she knew she was—at least in her love for him. But then she thought what suffering the remembrance of herself would cost him, and she wished to live. He felt that she moved her hand to her pocket, and he knew why it went there. He pitied her, but he pitied himself more, and though her tears wrought on him sufficiently to prevent any further cruelty, he did not repent.