She did not say anything openly uncivil to Mary Haselden; but she let the damsel see that she pitied her and despised her infatuated condition; and this was so unpleasant that Mary was fain to fall back upon the society of ponies and terriers, and to take up her pilgrim’s staff and go wandering over the hills, carrying her happy thoughts into solitary places, and sitting for hours in a heathery hollow, steeped in a sea of summer light, and trying to paint the mountain side and the rush of the waterfall.  Her sketch-book was an excuse for hours of solitude, for the indulgence of an endless day-dream.

Sometimes she went among her humble friends in the Grasmere cottages, or in the villages of Great and Little Langdale; and she had now a new interest in these visits, for she had made up her mind that it was her solemn duty to learn housekeeping—­not such housekeeping as might have been learnt at Fellside, supposing she had mustered the courage to ask the dignified upper-servants in that establishment to instruct her; but such domestic arts as are needed in the dwellings of the poor.  The art of making a very little money go a great way; the art of giving grace, neatness, prettiness to the smallest rooms and the shabbiest furniture; the art of packing all the ugly appliances and baser necessities of daily life, the pots and kettles and brooms and pails, into the narrowest compass, and hiding them from the aesthetic eye.  Mary thought that if she began by learning the homely devices of the villagers—­the very A B C of cookery and housewifery—­she might gradually enlarge upon this simple basis to suit an income of from five to seven hundred a year.  The house-mothers from whom she sought information were puzzled at this sudden curiosity about domestic matters.  They looked upon the thing as a freak of girlhood which drifted into eccentricity, from sheer idleness; yet they were not the less ready to teach Mary anything she desired to learn.  They told her those secret arts by which coppers and brasses are made things of beauty, and meet adornment for an old oak mantelshelf.  They allowed her to look on at the milking of the cow, and at the churning of the butter; and at bread making, and cake making, and pie and pudding making; and some pleasant hours were spent in the acquirement of this useful knowledge.  Mary did not neglect the invalid during this new phase of her existence.  Lady Maulevrier was a lover of routine, and she liked her granddaughter to go to her at the same hour every day.  From eleven to twelve was the time for Mary’s duty as amanuensis.  Sometimes there were no letters to be written.  Sometimes there were several; but her ladyship rarely allowed the task to go beyond the stroke of noon.  At noon Mary was free, and free till five o’clock, when she was generally in attendance, ready to give Lady Maulevrier her afternoon tea, and sit and talk with her, and tell her any scraps of local news which she had gathered in the day.