stead of chipping the shell
in which the girl's faculty lay dormant, would have smashed the whole
egg into a miserable albuminous mass. And he was well rewarded; for,
the same day, in the evening, he heard her singing gayly over her work,
and listening discovered that she was singing verse after verse of one
of the best ballads in the whole book. She had chosen with the fancy of
pleasing Godfrey; she sang to please herself. After this discovery he
set himself in earnest to the task of developing her intellectual life,
and, daily almost, grew more interested in the endeavor. His main
object was to make her think; and for the high purpose, chiefly but not
exclusively, he employed verse.

The main obstacle to success he soon discovered to be Letty's exceeding
distrust of herself. I would not be mistaken to mean that she had too
little confidence in herself; of that no one can have too little.
Self-distrust will only retard, while self-confidence will betray. The
man ignorant in these things will answer me, "But you must have one or
the other." "You must have neither," I reply. "You must follow the
truth, and, in that pursuit, the less one thinks about himself, the
pursuer, the better. Let him so hunger and thirst after the truth that
the dim vision of it occupies all his being, and leaves no time to
think of his hunger and his thirst. Self-forgetfulness in the reaching
out after that which is essential to us is the healthiest of mental
conditions. One has to look to his way, to his deeds, to his
conduct--not to himself. In such losing of the false, or merely
reflected, we find the true self. There is no harm in being stupid, so
long as a man does not think himself clever; no good in being clever,
if a man thinks himself so, for that is a short way to the worst
stupidity. If you think yourself clever, set yourself to do something;
then you will have a chance of humiliation."

With good faculties, and fine instincts, Letty was always thinking she
must be wrong, just because it was she was in it--a lovely fault, no
doubt, but a fault greatly impeditive to progress, and tormenting to a
teacher. She got on very fairly in spite of it, however; and her
devotion to Godfrey, as she felt herself growing in his sight,
increased almost to a passion. Do not misunderstand me, my reader. If I
say anything grows to a passion, I mean, of course, the passion of that
thing, not of something else. Here I no more mean that her devotion
becam