orming the household. She took
Mrs. Lethbury in hand first; then she extended her efforts to the
servants, with consequences more disastrous to the domestic harmony;
and lastly she applied herself to Lethbury. She proved to him by
statistics that he smoked too much, and that it was injurious to the
optic nerve to read in bed. She took him to task for not going to
church more regularly, and pointed out to him the evils of desultory
reading. She suggested that a regular course of study encourages mental
concentration, and hinted that inconsecutiveness of thought is a sign
of approaching age.

To her adopted mother her suggestions were equally pertinent. She
instructed Mrs. Lethbury in an improved way of making beef stock, and
called her attention to the unhygienic qualities of carpets. She poured
out distracting facts about bacilli and vegetable mould, and
demonstrated that curtains and picture-frames are a hot-bed of animal
organisms. She learned by heart the nutritive ingredients of the
principal articles of diet, and revolutionized the cuisine by an
attempt to establish a scientific average between starch and
phosphates. Four cooks left during this experiment, and Lethbury fell
into the habit of dining at his club.

Once or twice, at the outset, he had tried to check Jane's ardor; but
his efforts resulted only in hurting his wife's feelings. Jane remained
impervious, and Mrs. Lethbury resented any attempt to protect her from
her daughter. Lethbury saw that she was consoled for the sense of her
own inferiority by the thought of what Jane's intellectual
companionship must be to him; and he tried to keep up the illusion by
enduring with what grace he might the blighting edification of Jane's
discourse.

V

As Jane grew up, he sometimes avenged himself by wondering if his wife
was still sorry that they had not called her Muriel. Jane was not ugly;
she developed, indeed, a kind of categorical prettiness that might have
been a projection of her mind. She had a creditable collection of
features, but one had to take an inventory of them to find out that she
was good-looking. The fusing grace had been omitted.

Mrs. Lethbury took a touching pride in her daughter's first steps in
the world. She expected Jane to take by her complexion those whom she
did not capture by her learning. But Jane's rosy freshness did not work
any perceptible ravages. Whether the young men guessed the axioms on
her lips and detected the encyclo