end of the holidays found Beth in a very different mood. Jim had
come with the ideas of his adolescence, and Mildred had brought new
music, and these together had helped to take her completely out of
herself. The rest from lessons, too--from her mother's method of
making education a martyrdom, and many more hours of each day than
usual spent in the open air, had also helped greatly to ease her mind
and strengthen her body, so that, even in the time, which was only a
few weeks, she had recovered her colour, shot up, and expanded.

Most of the time she had spent with Jim, whom she had studied with
absorbing interest, his point of view was so wholly unexpected. And even
in these early days she showed a trait of character for which she
afterwards became remarkable; that is to say, she learned the whole of
the facts of a case before she formed an opinion on its merits--listened
and observed uncritically, without prejudice and without personal
feeling, until she was fully informed. Life unfolded itself to her like
the rules of arithmetic. She could not conjecture what the answer would
be in any single example from a figure or two, but had to take them all
down in order to work the sum. And her object was always, not to prove
herself right in any guess she might have made, but to arrive at the
truth. She was eleven years old at this time, but looked fourteen.

It was when she went out shooting with Jim that they used to have
their most interesting discussions. Jim used to take her to carry
things, but never offered her a shot, because she was a girl. She did
not care about that, however, because she had made up her mind to take
the gun when he was gone, and go out shooting on her own account; and
she abstracted a certain amount of powder and shot from his flasks
each day to pay herself for her present trouble, and also to be ready
for the future. Uncle James had given Jim leave to shoot, provided he
sent the game he killed to Fairholm; and sometimes they spent the day
wandering through the woods after birds, and sometimes they sat on the
cliffs, which skirted the property, potting rabbits. Jim expected Beth
to act as a keeper for him, and also to retrieve like a well-trained
dog; and when on one occasion she disappointed him, he had a good deal
to say about the uselessness of sisters and the inferiority of the sex
generally. Women, he always maintained, were only fit to sew on
buttons and mend socks.

"But is it contemptible