picture galleries and libraries to the people on Sunday?"
"The arguments for it are plausible."
"Certainly plausible. What do you think?"
"It is of no consequence, is it, what any individual thinks?"
"Why yes, as it seems to me. By comparing views and the reasons given in support of the views, one may hope to attain some sound conclusion."
"Is it a matter for reason to consider?"
Mrs. Busby opened her eyes. "Is not everything that, Mr. Southwode?"
"I should answer 'no,' if I answered."
"Please answer, because I am very much in earnest; and I like to drive every question to the bottom. Give me an instance to the contrary."
"When you tell Miss Antoinette, for example, to put on india rubbers when she goes out in the wet, is she to exercise her reason upon the thickness of the soles of her boots?"
"Yes," cried the young lady referred to; "of course I am! India rubbers are horrid things anyhow; do you think I am going to put them on with boots an inch thick?"
Mr. Southwode turned his eyes upon her with one of his grave smiles. Mrs. Busby seemed to ponder the subject.
"Is it raining to-night, Mr. Southwode?" Antoinette went on.
"Yes."
"How provoking! then I can't go out. Mr. Southwode, you never took me anywhere, to see anything."
"True, I believe," he answered. "How could I ask Mrs. Busby to trust me with the care of such an article?"
"What 'such an article'?"
"Subject to damage; in which case the damage would be very great."
"I am not subject to damage. I never get cold or anything. Mr. Southwode, won't you take me, some night, to see the Minstrels?"
"They are not much to see."
"But to hear, they are. Won't you, Mr. Southwode? I am crazy to hear them, and mamma won't take me; and papa never goes anywhere but to his office and to court; won't you, Mr. Southwode?"
"Perhaps; if Mrs. Busby will honour me so much."
"O mamma will trust _you_, I know. Then the first clear evening, Mr. Southwode? the first that you are at leisure?"
Without answering her he turned to Mrs. Busby.
"How is Rotha?"
"Very well!" the lady answered smoothly.
"Shall I have the pleasure of seeing her?"
"I am afraid, not to-night. She was unable to come down stairs this afternoon, and so took her dinner alone. Next time, I hope, she will be able to see you."
Mr. Digby privately wondered what the detaining cause could be, but thought it most discreet not to inquire; at least, not in this quarter. "Is the school question decided?" he therefore went on quietly.
"Why no. I have been debating the pros. and cons.; in which process one is very apt to get confused. As soon as one makes up one's mind to forego certain advantages in favour of certain others, the rejected ones immediately rise up in fresh colours of allurement before the mind, and disturb one's judgment, and the whole calculation has to be gone over again."
"The choice lies between--?"
"Mrs. Mulligan, Miss Wordsworth, and Mrs. Mowbray, have the highest name in the city."
"And may I know the supposed counter advantages and disadvantages?"
"I'll tell you, Mr. Southwode," said Antoinette. "At Mrs. Mulligan's you learn French and manners. At Miss Wordsworth's you learn arithmetic and spelling. At Mrs. Mowbray's you learn Latin and the Catechism."
Mr. Southwode looked to Mrs. Busby.
"That's rather a caricature," said the lady smiling; "but it has some truth. I think Mrs. Mowbray's is quite as fashionable a school as Mrs. Mulligan's. It is quite as dear."
"Is it thought desirable, that it should be fashionable?"
"Certainly; for that shews what is public opinion. Besides, it secures one against undesirable companions for a girl. Both at Mrs. Mulligan's and Mrs. Mowbray's the pupils come from the very best families, both South and North. There is a certain security in that."
Mr. Southwode allowed the conversation presently to take another turn, and soon took his leave.
Rotha had watched and listened from the upper hall; had heard him come in, and then had waited in an ecstasy of impatient eagerness till she should be sent for. She could hear the murmur of voices in the parlour; but otherwise the house was ominously quiet. No doors opening, no bell to call the servant, no stir at all; until the parlour door opened and Mr. Digby came out. Rotha was in a very agony, half ready to rush down, unsummoned, and see him; and yet held back by a shy feeling of proud reserve. He could ask for her if he had wanted her, she thought bitterly; and while she lingered he had put on his overshoes and was gone. Rotha crept up stairs to her own room, feeling desperately disappointed. That her aunt might have made excuses to keep her up stairs, she divined; but the thought put her in a rage. She had to sit a long while looking out of her window at the lights twinkling here and there through the rain, before the fever in her blood and her brain had cooled down enough to let her go to bed and to sleep.
The next day she began her school experience. The intervening day had been used by Mrs. Busby to make a call upon Mrs. Mowbray, in which she explained that she had an orphan niece left under her care, for whom she much desired the training and the discipline of Mrs. Mowbray's excellent school. The girl had had no advantages; her mother had been ill and the child neglected; she supposed Mrs. Mowbray would find that she knew next to nothing of all that she ought to know. So it was arranged that Rotha should accompany her cousin the very next morning, and make her beginning in one of the younger classes.
Rotha went in her old grey dress. The walk was not long. Antoinette stopped at the area gate of a house in a fine open street.
"Where are you going?" said Rotha.
"Here. This is the place."
"This? Why it is a very handsome house," said Rotha. "As good as yours."
"Of course it is handsome," Antoinette replied. "Do you think my mother would let me go to a shabby place. Handsome! of course it is. Come down this way; we don't ring the bell."
What a new world it was to Rotha! In the lower hall the girls took off bonnets and wraps, hanging them up on hooks arranged there. Then Antoinette took her up stairs, up a second flight of stairs, through halls and stairways which renewed Rotha's astonishment. Was this a school? All the arrangements seemed like those of an elegant private home; soft carpet was on the stairs, beautiful engravings hung on the walls. The school rooms filled the second floor; they were already crowded, it seemed to Rotha, with rows and ranks of scholars of all sizes, from ten years old up. Antoinette and she, being later than the rest, slipped into the first seats they could find, near the door.
There was deep silence and great order, and then Rotha heard a voice in the next room beginning to read a chapter in the Bible. The sound of the voice struck her and made her wish to get a sight of the reader; but that was impossible, for a bit of partition wall hid her and indeed most of the room in which she was from Rotha's view. So Rotha's attention concentrated itself upon what she could see. The pleasant, bright apartments; the desks before which sat so many well-dressed and well-looking girls; ah, they were very well dressed, and many of them, to her fancy, very richly dressed; as for the faces, she found there was the usual diversity. But what would anybody think of a girl coming among them so very shabby and meanly attired as she was? If she had known-- However, self-consciousness was not one of Rotha's troubles, and soon in her admiration of the maps and pictures on the walls she almost forgot her own poor little person. She was aware that after the reading came a prayer; but though she knelt as others knelt, I am bound to say very little of the sense of the words found its way to her mind.
After that the girls separated. Rotha was introduced by her cousin to a certain Miss Blodgett, one of the teachers, under whose care she was placed, and by whom she was taken to a room apart and set down to her work along with a class of some forty girls, all of them or nearly all, younger than she was. An
d here, for a number of days, Rotha's school life went on monotonously. She was given little to do that she could not do easily; she was assigned no lessons that were not already familiar; she was put to acquire no knowledge that she did not already possess. She got sight of nobody but Miss Blodgett and the girls; for every morning she was sure to be crowded into that same corner at school-opening, where she could not look at Mrs. Mowbray; nobody else wanted that place, so they gave it to her; and Rotha was never good at self-assertion, unless at such times as her blood was up. She took the place meekly. But school was very tiresome to her; and it gave her nothing to distract her thoughts from her