e pity. She was miserably
poor, too, and had an unsuccessful father, no doubt as stupid as
herself, and made pitiful excuses for not forwarding the slender fees
with regularity.

Everybody who is poor should be, on that ground alone, worthy of pity
and sympathy. But the hardness and stupidity, and the ill-temper, all
combined and clearly shown in her letters, repelled her tutor. Iris,
who drew imaginary portraits of her pupils, pictured the girl as plain
to look upon, with a dull eye, a leathery, pallid cheek, a forehead
without sunshine upon it, and lips which seldom parted with a smile.

Then there was, besides, a Cambridge undergraduate. He was neither
clever, nor industrious, nor very ambitious; he thought that a
moderate place was quite good enough for him to aim at, and he found
that his unknown and obscure tutor by correspondence was cheap and
obliging, and willing to take trouble, and quite as efficacious for
his purposes as the most expensive Cambridge coach. Iris presently
discovered that he was lazy and luxurious, a deceiver of himself, a
dweller in Fool's Paradise and a constant shirker of work. Therefore,
she disliked him. Had she actually known him and talked with him, she
might have liked him better in spite of these faults and shortcomings,
for he was really a pleasant, easygoing youth, who wallowed in
intellectual sloth, but loved physical activity; who will presently
drop easily, and comfortably, and without an effort or a doubt, into
the bosom of the Church, and will develop later on into an admirable
country parson, unless they disestablish the Establishment: in which
case, I do not know what he will do.

But this other man, this man who was coming for an explanation, this
Mr. Arnold Arbuthnot, was, if you please, a very different kind of
pupil. In the first place he was a gentleman, a fact which he
displayed, not ostentatiously, in every line of his letters; next, he
had come to her for instruction--the only pupil she had in that
science, in heraldry, which she loved. It is far more pleasant to be
describing a shield and settling questions in the queer old language
of this queer old science, than in solving and propounding problems in
trigonometry and conic sections. And then--how if your pupil begins to
talk round the subject and to wander into other things? You cannot
very well talk round a branch of mathematics, but heraldry is a
subject surrounded by fields, meadows, and lawns, so to speak, a