hree years of constant trying had enabled her to talk upon most
subjects in a shibboleth of the world which imposed upon everyone. Her
real talent which called for the greatest admiration was the way in
which she manipulated what she knew, and skimmed a fresh subject. She
would do so with such admirable skill and wording as to give the
impression that she was acquainted with its profoundest depths; and then
when she was safely over the chasm the first moment she was free she
would rush to Arabella for the salient points, doggedly repeat them over
and over, and on the next occasion come out with them to the same
person, convincing him more than ever of her thorough knowledge of the
subject. But her memory was her misfortune, for if Miss Clinker
instructed her, for instance, in all the different peculiarities of the
styles of Keats and Shelley, a week after she would have forgotten which
was which--because both bored her to distraction--and she would have to
be reminded again. One awful moment came when, rhapsodizing upon the
sensibility of Keats' character, she said to Sir Tedbury Delvine, the
finest litterateur of his time, that there must have come moments during
Keats' latter years when he must have felt as his own "Prometheus
Unbound"! But, seeing her mistake immediately by her listener's blank
face, she regained her ground with a skill and a flow of words which
made Sir Tedbury Delvine doubt whether his own ears had heard aright.

"Arabella," Mrs. Cricklander said when next morning she lay smoking in
her old-rose silk bed, while she went through her usual lessons for the
day, "you must give me just a point each about those wretched old two,
so that I will remember them again. I must have a sort of keynote.
Shelley's would do with that horrible statue of him drowned, at Oxford,
that would connect his chain--but what for Keats?"

So at last Miss Clinker invented a plan, almost Pythagorean in its way,
and it proved very helpful to her patroness.

When she went on light, amusing excursions to Egypt and such places, she
allowed Arabella to remain with her mother, and these were months of
pure happiness to Miss Clinker.

It had not taken Mrs. Cricklander long to conquer London with her money,
and her looks, and her triumphant belief in herself. At the end of two
years, when John Derringham was first presented to her, she had almost
reached the summit of her ambitions. To become his wife she had decided
would place her