munities usually granted to
exceptional people; in any ordinary position of life she would bear the
test of any ordinary difficulty very well. She inherits common sense
from her father, an honest country gentleman of the kind now
unfortunately growing every day more rare; a man not so countrified as
to break his connection with the intelligent world, nor so foolishly
ambitious as to abandon a happy life in the country in order to pursue
the mirage of petty political importance: a man who holds humbug in
supreme contempt, and having purged it from his being has still
something to fall back upon. From her mother Hermione inherits an
extreme conscientiousness in the things of every-day life; but whereas
in Mary Carvel this scrupulous pursuance of what is right is on the
verge of degenerating into morbid religionism, in Hermione it is
tempered by occasional bursts of enthusiasm, and relieved by a wholesome
and natural capacity for liking some people and disliking others.

In the drawing-room I have been describing, Hermione touched everything,
and did her best to cast over the various objects some grace, some air
of harmony, which should make the contrasted tastes of the rest of her
family less glaring and unpleasant to the eye. Her task was not easy,
and it was no fault of hers if the room was out of joint. Her love of
flowers showed itself everywhere, and she knew how to take advantage of
each inch of room on shelf, or table, or window-seat, filling all
available spaces with a profusion of roses, geraniums, and blossoms of
every kind that chanced to be in season. Flowers in a room will do what
nothing else can accomplish. The eye turns gladly to the living plant,
when wearied and strained with the incongruities of inanimate things. A
pot of pinks makes the lowliest and most dismal cottage chamber look gay
by comparison; a single rose in a glass of water lights up the most
dusty den of the most dusty student. A bit of climbing ivy converts a
hideous ruin into a bower, as the Alp roses and the Iva make a garden
for one short month of the roughest rocks in the Grisons. Only that
which lives and of which the life is beautiful can reconcile us to those
surroundings which would otherwise offend our sense of harmony, or
oppress us with a dullness even more deadly than mere ugliness can ever
be.

Hermione loves all flowers, and at Carvel Place she was the sweetest
blossom of them all. Her fresh vitality is of the contagious kind