ocked at every door in
the kingdom for help, rather than accept tutorships, and disturb
households (or providently-minded mistresses of them) with all sorts of
probably groundless apprehensions, founded naturally enough on the good
looks he intrudes.

This tutor committed the offence next day of showing he had a firm and
easy seat in the saddle, which increased Lady Charlotte's liking for him
and irritated her watchful forecasts. She rode with the young man after
lunch, "to show him the country," and gave him a taste of what he took
for her variable moods. He misjudged her. Like a swimmer going through
warm and cold springs of certain lake waters, he thought her a capricious
ladyship, dangerous for intimacy, alluring to the deeps and gripping with
cramps.

She pushed him to defend his choice of the tutor's profession.

"Think you understand boys?" she caught up his words; "you can't. You can
humour them, as you humour women. They're just as hard to read. And don't
tell me a young man can read women. Boys and women go on their instincts.
Egyptologists can spell you hieroglyphs; they'd be stumped, as Leo would
say, to read a spider out of an ink-pot over a sheet of paper."

"One gets to interpret by degrees, by observing their habits," the tutor
said, and vexed her with a towering complacency under provocation that
went some way further to melt the woman she was, while her knowledge of
the softness warned her still more of the duty of playing dragon round
such a young man in her house. The despot is alert at every issue, to
every chance; and she was one, the wakefuller for being benevolent; her
mind had no sleep by day.

For a month she subjected Mr. Matthew Weyburn to the microscope of her
observation and the probe of her instinct. He proved that he could manage
without cajoling a boy. The practical fact established, by agreement
between herself and the unobservant gentleman who was her husband, Lady
Charlotte allowed her meditations to drop an indifferent glance at the
speculative views upon education entertained by this young tutor. To her
mind they were flighty; but she liked him, and as her feelings dictated
to her mind when she had not to think for others, she spoke of his views
toleratingly, almost with an implied approval, after passing them through
the form of burlesque to which she customarily treated things failing to
waft her enthusiasm. In regard to Philippa, he behaved well: he bestowed
more of his atte