w what is best for Jane. I'm
sure she has a wonderfully good mind, and I should reproach myself if I
didn't give her every opportunity." She looked at him helplessly. "You
must tell me what ought to be done."

Lethbury was not unwilling to oblige her. Somewhere in his mental
lumber-room there rusted a theory of education such as usually lingers
among the impedimenta of the childless. He brought this out,
refurbished it, and applied it to Jane. At first he thought his wife
had not overrated the quality of the child's mind. Jane seemed
extraordinarily intelligent. Her precocious definiteness of mind was
encouraging to her inexperienced preceptor. She had no difficulty in
fixing her attention, and he felt that every fact he imparted was being
etched in metal. He helped his wife to engage the best teachers, and
for a while continued to take an ex-official interest in his adopted
daughter's studies. But gradually his interest waned. Jane's ideas did
not increase with her acquisitions. Her young mind remained a mere
receptacle for facts: a kind of cold-storage from which anything that
had been put there could be taken out at a moment's notice, intact but
congealed. She developed, moreover, an inordinate pride in the capacity
of her mental storehouse, and a tendency to pelt her public with its
contents. She was overheard to jeer at her nurse for not knowing when
the Saxon Heptarchy had fallen, and she alternately dazzled and
depressed Mrs. Lethbury by the wealth of her chronological allusions.
She showed no interest in the significance of the facts she amassed:
she simply collected dates as another child might have collected stamps
or marbles. To her foster-mother she seemed a prodigy of wisdom; but
Lethbury saw, with a secret movement of sympathy, how the aptitudes in
which Mrs. Lethbury gloried were slowly estranging her from their
possessor.

"She is getting too clever for me," his wife said to him, after one of
Jane's historical flights, "but I am so glad that she will be a
companion to you."

Lethbury groaned in spirit. He did not look forward to Jane's
companionship. She was still a good little girl: but there was
something automatic and formal in her goodness, as though it were a
kind of moral calisthenics that she went through for the sake of
showing her agility. An early consciousness of virtue had moreover
constituted her the natural guardian and adviser of her elders. Before
she was fifteen she had set about ref