rge gowns reaching to the ankles that ladies were
wont to disport themselves in amidst the surf--gowns in which it was
impossible to do anything but bob up and down at the end of a rope.

It was curious that a man who was half a Frenchman should have been the
one to have such advanced ideas on female education, but then Mr. Eliot
was the son of a refugee, which says much. For those French aristocrats,
who never turned hand to a task in their lives till the Revolution,
lived to learn very differently after their flight. The farm and the
shop taught what the court had failed to impart, and the blood that
despite folly directs so truly in moments of extremity did not fail
them. The children who, had the course of events never been ruffled,
would have grown up in a vicious and futile court, were forced to
practise economies and learn at first hand the dignity of labour. With
those families who returned to the increasing viciousness which
culminated under Napoleon III. the lesson may not always have been
lasting, but for those who, like the forbears of Mr. Eliot, allied
themselves with their English hosts, and remained where they were, the
hard life of struggle, if the alliance had not been rich, continued the
new philosophy. Added to all this normal cause, Hilaria's father was
certainly an original, or rather one of those people considered so
because they are ahead of their time and condemned to misunderstanding
in consequence.

None of it mattered to Mr. Eliot, who drifted about the world in a daze
that, had it been a happy one, would have made him an enviable man. As
it was, his invincible habit of over-sensitive gloom robbed him of the
detachment which is the most truly enviable of all the gifts of the
gods. He was a little man, beautifully made, with the high nose, the
tossed-back hair, the piercing look of the man at once prejudiced and
nervous. He lived wrapt in himself, and saw in his daughter more his own
hope in old age than a creature wonderful in her youth and vitality for
her own ends. When the crude heartlessness of the boys racked him or
the well-meaning advances of the gentry offended his alert vanity, it
was to Hilaria that he would turn in thoughts and words to attain that
measure of approbation without which his own self-love would have
languished of inanition. It was Hilaria who healed his hurts, though
with increasing difficulty. For there is little gulf, and that easily
bridged, between the very young