raeulein was not disposed to be sympathetic or agreeable about Lady
Mary's engagement. Firstly, she had not been consulted about it. The
thing had been done, she considered, in an underhand manner; and Lady
Maulevrier, who had begun by strenuously opposing the match, had been
talked over in a way that proved the latent weakness of that great
lady's character. Secondly, Miss Mueller, having herself for some reason
missed such joys as are involved in being wooed and won, was disposed to
look sourly upon all love affairs, and to take a despondent view of all
matrimonial engagements.

She did not say anything openly uncivil to Mary Haselden; but she let
the damsel see that she pitied her and despised her infatuated
condition; and this was so unpleasant that Mary was fain to fall back
upon the society of ponies and terriers, and to take up her pilgrim's
staff and go wandering over the hills, carrying her happy thoughts into
solitary places, and sitting for hours in a heathery hollow, steeped in
a sea of summer light, and trying to paint the mountain side and the
rush of the waterfall. Her sketch-book was an excuse for hours of
solitude, for the indulgence of an endless day-dream.

Sometimes she went among her humble friends in the Grasmere cottages, or
in the villages of Great and Little Langdale; and she had now a new
interest in these visits, for she had made up her mind that it was her
solemn duty to learn housekeeping--not such housekeeping as might have
been learnt at Fellside, supposing she had mustered the courage to ask
the dignified upper-servants in that establishment to instruct her; but
such domestic arts as are needed in the dwellings of the poor. The art
of making a very little money go a great way; the art of giving grace,
neatness, prettiness to the smallest rooms and the shabbiest furniture;
the art of packing all the ugly appliances and baser necessities of
daily life, the pots and kettles and brooms and pails, into the
narrowest compass, and hiding them from the aesthetic eye. Mary thought
that if she began by learning the homely devices of the villagers--the
very A B C of cookery and housewifery--she might gradually enlarge upon
this simple basis to suit an income of from five to seven hundred a
year. The house-mothers from whom she sought information were puzzled at
this sudden curiosity about domestic matters. They looked upon the thing
as a freak of girlhood which drifted into eccentricity, from sheer