dered the more lax, too, by her being an
immoderate reader, who fed on novels from morning till night, and slept
with a page turned down beside her bed. She was for ever lost in the
joys or sorrows of some fictitious person, and, in consequence,
remained for the most part completely ignorant of what was going on
around her. When she did happen to become conscious of her
surroundings, she was callous, or merely indifferent, to them; for,
compared with romance, life was dull and diffuse; it lacked the wilful
simplicity, the exaggerative omissions, and forcible perspectives,
which make up art: in other words, life demanded that unceasing work of
selection and rejection, which it is the story-teller's duty to Perform
for his readers. All novels were fish to Mrs. Cayhill's net; she lived
in a world of intrigue and excitement, and, seated in her easy-chair by
the sitting-room window, was generally as remote from her family as
though she were in Timbuctoo.

There was a difference of ten years in age between her daughters, and
it was the younger of the two whose education was being completed.
Johanna, the elder, had been a disappointment to her mother. Left to
her own devices at an impressionable age, the girl had developed
bookish tastes at the cost of her appearance: influenced by a
free-thinking tutor of her brothers', she had read Huxley and Haeckel,
Goethe and Schopenhauer. Her wish had been for a university career, but
she was not of a self-assertive nature, and when Mrs. Cayhill, who felt
her world toppling about her ears at the mention of such a thing, said:
"Not while I live!" she yielded, without a further word; and the fact
that such an emphatic expression of opinion had been drawn from the
mild-tempered mother, made it a matter of course that no other member
of the family took Johanna's part. So she buried her ambitions, and
kept her mother's house in an admirable, methodical way.

It was not the sacrifice it seemed, however, because Johanna adored her
little sister, and would cheerfully have given up more than this for
her sake. Ephie, who was at that time just emerging from childhood, was
very pretty and precocious, and her mother had great hopes of her. She
also tired early of her lesson-books, and, soon after she turned
sixteen, declared her intention of leaving school. As at least a couple
of years had still to elapse before she was old enough to be introduced
in society, Mrs. Cayhill, taking the one decisive