doubted.'

'But we were all to keep together, dear Miss Fennimore--you--'

'One whose mind has always been balancing between aspects of truth may
instruct, but cannot educate. Few minds can embrace the moral virtues
unless they are based on an undoubted foundation, connected with present
devotional warmth, and future hopes and fears. I see this now; I once
thought excellence would approve itself, for its own sake, to others, as
it did to myself. I regarded Bertha as a fair subject for a full
experiment of my system, with good disposition, good abilities, and few
counter influences. I meant to cultivate self-relying, unprejudiced,
effective good sense, and see--with prejudices have been rooted up
restraints!'

'Education seems to me to have little to do with what people turn out,'
said Phoebe. 'Look at poor Miss Charlecote and the Sandbrooks.'

'Depend upon it, Phoebe, that whatever harm may have ensued from her
errors in detail, those young people will yet bless her for the principle
she worked on. You can none of you bless me, for having guided the hands
of the watch, and having left the mainspring untouched.'

Miss Fennimore had been, like Helvetius and the better class of
encyclopaedists, enamoured of the moral virtues, but unable to perceive
that they could not be separated from the Christian faith, and she learnt
like them that, when doctrine ceased to be prominent, practice went after
it. Bertha was her Jacobin--and seemed doubly so the next morning, when
an interview took place, in which the young lady gave her to understand
that she, like Phoebe, was devoid of the experience that would enable
them to comprehend the sacred mutual duty of souls that once had spoken.
Woman was no longer the captive of the seraglio, nor the chronicler of
small beer. Intellectual training conferred rights of choice superior to
conventional ties; and, as to the infallible discernment of that fifteen
year old judgment, had not she the sole premises to go upon, she who
alone had been admitted to the innermost of that manly existence?

'I always knew Jack to be a clever dog,' said Mervyn, when this was
reported to him, 'but his soft sawder to a priggish metaphysical baby
must have been the best fun in the world?'

Mervyn's great desire was to keep Bertha's folly as great a secret as
possible; and, by his decision, she was told that grace should be granted
her till Mr. Crabbe's arrival, when, unless she had renounced what he