graces when once established there. He ought to have knocked at every
door in the kingdom for help, rather than accept tutorships, and disturb
households (or providently-minded mistresses of them) with all sorts of
probably groundless apprehensions, founded naturally enough on the good
looks he intrudes.

This tutor committed the offence next day of showing he had a firm and
easy seat in the saddle, which increased Lady Charlotte's liking for him
and irritated her watchful forecasts. She rode with the young man after
lunch, "to show him the country," and gave him a taste of what he took
for her variable moods. He misjudged her. Like a swimmer going
through warm and cold springs of certain lake waters, he thought her a
capricious ladyship, dangerous for intimacy, alluring to the deeps and
gripping with cramps.

She pushed him to defend his choice of the tutor's profession.

"Think you understand boys?" she caught up his words; "you can't. You
can humour them, as you humour women. They're just as hard to read. And
don't tell me a young man can read women. Boys and women go on their
instincts. Egyptologists can spell you hieroglyphs; they'd be stumped,
as Leo would say, to read a spider out of an ink-pot over a sheet of
paper."

"One gets to interpret by degrees, by observing their habits," the tutor
said, and vexed her with a towering complacency under provocation that
went some way further to melt the woman she was, while her knowledge of
the softness warned her still more of the duty of playing dragon round
such a young man in her house. The despot is alert at every issue, to
every chance; and she was one, the wakefuller for being benevolent; her
mind had no sleep by day.

For a month she subjected Mr. Matthew Weyburn to the microscope of
her observation and the probe of her instinct. He proved that he could
manage without cajoling a boy. The practical fact established, by
agreement between herself and the unobservant gentleman who was her
husband, Lady Charlotte allowed her meditations to drop an indifferent
glance at the speculative views upon education entertained by this young
tutor. To her mind they were flighty; but she liked him, and as her
feelings dictated to her mind when she had not to think for others, she
spoke of his views toleratingly, almost with an implied approval, after
passing them through the form of burlesque to which she customarily
treated things failing to waft her enthusiasm. In regard to