ould not have brought
her up so well; indeed, there were moments when I fancied that Cecily,
contrasting me with her aunts, wondered a little what my bringing up
could have been like. With this reserve of criticism on Cecily's part,
however, we got on very tolerably, largely because I found it impossible
to assume any responsibility towards her, and in moments of doubt or
discipline referred her to her aunts. We spent a pleasant summer with
a little girl in the house whose interest in us was amusing, and whose
outings it was gratifying to arrange; but when we went back, I had no
desire to take her with us. I thought her very much better where she
was.

Then came the period which is filled, in a subordinate degree, with
Cecily's letters. I do not wish to claim more than I ought; they were
not my only or even my principal interest in life. It was a long
period; it lasted till she was twenty-one. John had had promotion in the
meantime, and there was rather more money, but he had earned his second
brevet with a bullet through one lung, and the doctors ordered our leave
to be spent in South Africa. We had photographs, we knew she had
grown tall and athletic and comely, and the letters were always very
creditable. I had the unusual and qualified privilege of watching my
daughter's development from ten to twenty-one, at a distance of
four thousand miles, by means of the written word. I wrote myself as
provocatively as possible; I sought for every string, but the vibration
that came back across the seas to me was always other than the one I
looked for, and sometimes there was none. Nevertheless, Mrs. Farnham
wrote me that Cecily very much valued my communications. Once when I had
described an unusual excursion in a native state, I learned that she
had read my letter aloud to the sewing circle. After that I abandoned
description, and confined myself to such intimate personal details as no
sewing circle could find amusing. The child's own letters were simply
a mirror of the ideas of the Farnham ladies; that must have been so,
it was not altogether my jaundiced eye. Alice and Emma and grandmamma
paraded the pages in turn. I very early gave up hope of discoveries
in my daughter, though as much of the original as I could detect was
satisfactorily simple and sturdy. I found little things to criticize,
of course, tendencies to correct; and by return post I criticized and
corrected, but the distance and the deliberation seemed to touch