to follow. Lady Gore's perceptions, far
more acute as regarded her daughter than her husband, and rendered more
vivid still by the whole concentration of her maternal being in Rachel,
had entirely realised, while she wondered at it, the complete lack in
her child of the modern ferment that seethes in the female mind of our
days. But she had finally come to see that if Rachel was entirely happy
and contented with her life it was a result to rejoice over rather than
be discontented with, even though her horizon did not extend much beyond
her own home. Besides, it is always well to rejoice over a result we
cannot modify. Needless to say that the girl, who blindly accepted her
mother's opinion even on indifferent subjects, was, biassed by her own
affection, more than ready to endow her father with all the qualities
Lady Gore believed him to possess. She had arrived at the age of
twenty-two without realising that there could be for her any claims in
the world that would be paramount to these, anything that could possibly
come before her allegiance to her parents.

One of the bitterest pangs of Lady Gore's bitter renunciation was the
moment when she realised that she could not be the one to guide Rachel's
first steps in a wider world than that of her home, that all her plans
and theories about the moment when the girl should grow up, when her
mother would accompany her, steer her, help her at every step, must
necessarily be brought to nought. And this mother, alas! had been so
full of plans; she had so anxiously watched other people and their
daughters, so carefully accumulated from her observation the many
warnings and the few examples which constitute what is called the
teaching of experience. But when the time came the lesson had been
learnt in vain. Rachel's eighteenth and nineteenth years were spent in
anxious preoccupations about her mother's health, in solicitous care of
her father and the household, and the girl had glided gently from
childhood into womanhood with nothing but increased responsibility,
instead of more numerous pleasures, to mark the passage. But the result
was something very attractively unlike the ordinary product of the age.
She had had, from the conditions of her life, no very intimate and
confidential girl friends by whose point of view to readjust and
possibly lower her own, and with whom to compare every fleeting
manifestation of thought and feeling. She remained unconsciously
surrounded by an at