ct, working in them with a force as of
some blind fatality, drove too many of them to espouse their
opposites. Their wives were not expected to do anything noteworthy,
beyond sitting for their portraits to the masters of their day;
though, as a matter of fact, many of them contrived to achieve a far
less enviable distinction. The portraits have immortalized their faces
and their temperaments. Ladies of lax fibre, with shining lips and
hazy eyes; ladies of slender build, with small and fragile foreheads,
they hang for ever facing their uniformly heavy-browed and serious
lords. Looking at those faces you cannot wonder that those old
scholars had but a poor opinion of woman, the irrational and mutable
element in things, or that the library had been handed down from
father to son, from uncle to nephew, evading the cosmic vanity by
devious lines of descent. It was a tradition in the family that its
men should be scholars and its women beauties, occasionally frail.

And scholarship, in obedience to the family tradition, ran superbly in
the male line for ten generations, when it encountered an insuperable
obstacle in the temperament of Sir Frederick. Then came Sir
Frederick's daughter, and between them they made short work of the
family tradition. Sir Frederick had appropriated the features of one
of his great grandmothers, her auburn hair, her side-long eyes, her
fawn-like, tilted lip, her perfect ease of manners and of morals. By a
still more perverse hereditary freak the Harden intellect which had
lapsed in Sir Frederick appeared again in his daughter, not in its
well-known austere and colourless form, but with a certain brilliance
and passion, a touch of purely feminine uncertainty and charm.

The Harden intellect had changed its sex. It was Horace Jewdwine who
had found that out, counting it as the first of his many remarkable
discoveries. Being (in spite of his conviction to the contrary) a
Jewdwine rather than a Harden, he had felt a certain malignant but
voluptuous satisfaction in drawing the attention of the Master of
Lazarus to this curious lapse in the family tradition. Now in the
opinion of the Master of Lazarus the feminine intellect was simply a
contradiction in terms. Having engaged the best masters in the county,
whose fees together with their fares (second class from Exeter to
Harmouth) he had himself punctually paid, he had declined to take any
further interest in his grand-daughter. He had no objection to h