l. He was
aware of the pomp and circumstance which had surrounded her earlier
years; he respected the creditable energy with which she had devoted
her talents to the support of the young children thrown upon her care;
compassionated her bereavement of those little fellow-orphans for
whom toil had been rendered sweet; and he strove, by a kindness of
forethought and a delicacy of attention, which were the more prized in
a man so eminent and so preoccupied, to make her forget that she was a
salaried teacher--to place her saliently, and as a matter of course, in
the position of a gentlewoman, guest, and friend. Recognising in her
a certain vigour and force of intellect apart from her mere
accomplishments, he would flatter her scholastic pride, by referring to
her memory in some question of reading, or consulting her judgment
on some point of critical taste. She, in return, was touched by his
chivalrous kindness to the depth of a nature that, though already
seriously injured by its unhappy contact with a soul like Jasper's,
retained that capacity of gratitude, the loss of which is humanity's
last deprivation. Nor this alone: Arabella was startled by the intellect
and character of Darrell into that kind of homage which a woman, who has
hitherto met but her own intellectual inferiors, renders to the first
distinguished personage in whom she recognises, half with humility and
half with awe, an understanding and a culture to which her own reason is
but the flimsy glass-house, and her own knowledge but the forced exotic.

Arabella, thus roused from her first listlessness, sought to requite
Darrell's kindness by exerting every energy to render his insipid
daughter an accomplished woman. So far as mere ornamental education
extends, the teacher was more successful than, with all her experience,
her skill, and her zeal, she had presumed to anticipate. Matilda,
without ear, or taste, or love for music, became a very fair mechanical
musician. Without one artistic predisposition, she achieved the science
of perspective--she attained even to the mixture of colours--she filled
a portfolio with drawings which no young lady need have been ashamed to
see circling round a drawing-room. She carried Matilda's thin mind to
the farthest bound it could have reached without snapping, through
an elegant range of selected histories and harmless feminine
classics--through Gallic dialogues--through Tuscan themes--through
Teuton verbs--yea, across the i