for her
to embrace the tutor: so the lessons ended abruptly. Beth profited
largely by the acquaintance, however,--not so much at the time,
perhaps, as afterwards, when she was older, and had gained knowledge
enough of men of various kinds to enable her to compare and reflect.
It was her first introduction to the commonplace cleverness of the
academic mind, the mere acquisitive faculty which lives on pillage,
originates nothing itself, and, as a rule, fails to understand, let
alone appreciate, originality in others. The young tutor's ambition
was to be one of a shining literary clique of extraordinary cheapness
which had just then begun to be formed. The taint of a flippant wit
was common to all its members, and their assurance was unbounded. They
undertook to extinguish anybody with a few fine phrases; and, in their
conceited irreverence, they even attacked eternal principles, the
sources of the best inspiration of all ages, and pronounced sentence
upon them. Repute of a kind they gained, but it was by glib
falsifications of all that is noble in sentiment, thought, and action,
all that is good and true. It was the contraction of her own heart,
the chill and dulness that settled upon her when she was with this
man, as compared to the glow and expansion, the release of her finer
faculties, which she had always experienced when under the influence
of Aunt Victoria's simple goodness, that first put Beth in the way of
observing how inferior in force and charm mere intellect is to
spiritual power, and how soon it bores, even when brilliant, if
unaccompanied by other endowments, qualities of heart and soul, such
as constancy, loyalty, truthfulness, and that scrupulous honesty of
action which answers to what is expected as well as to what is known
of us.

Beth played very diligently at learning during this experiment, but
only played for a time. The mind in process of forming itself
involuntarily rejects all that is unnecessary, and that kind of
knowledge was not for her. It opened up no prospect of pleasure in
itself. All she cared to know was what it felt like to have mastered
it; and that she arrived at by resolving herself into a lady of great
attainments, who talked altogether about things she had learnt, but
had nothing in her mind besides. A mind with nothing else in it, in
Beth's sense of the word, was to Beth what plainness is to beauty; so,
while many of her contemporaries were stultifying themselves with
Greek and