The chronicler who recorded that no woman had ever inherited the Harden Library contented himself with the bare statement of the fact.  It was not his business to search into its causes, which belonged to the obscurer regions of psychology.  Sir Joseph Harden and those book-lovers who went before him had the incurable defects of their qualities.  Hereditary instinct, working in them with a force as of some blind fatality, drove too many of them to espouse their opposites.  Their wives were not expected to do anything noteworthy, beyond sitting for their portraits to the masters of their day; though, as a matter of fact, many of them contrived to achieve a far less enviable distinction.  The portraits have immortalized their faces and their temperaments.  Ladies of lax fibre, with shining lips and hazy eyes; ladies of slender build, with small and fragile foreheads, they hang for ever facing their uniformly heavy-browed and serious lords.  Looking at those faces you cannot wonder that those old scholars had but a poor opinion of woman, the irrational and mutable element in things, or that the library had been handed down from father to son, from uncle to nephew, evading the cosmic vanity by devious lines of descent.  It was a tradition in the family that its men should be scholars and its women beauties, occasionally frail.

And scholarship, in obedience to the family tradition, ran superbly in the male line for ten generations, when it encountered an insuperable obstacle in the temperament of Sir Frederick.  Then came Sir Frederick’s daughter, and between them they made short work of the family tradition.  Sir Frederick had appropriated the features of one of his great grandmothers, her auburn hair, her side-long eyes, her fawn-like, tilted lip, her perfect ease of manners and of morals.  By a still more perverse hereditary freak the Harden intellect which had lapsed in Sir Frederick appeared again in his daughter, not in its well-known austere and colourless form, but with a certain brilliance and passion, a touch of purely feminine uncertainty and charm.

The Harden intellect had changed its sex.  It was Horace Jewdwine who had found that out, counting it as the first of his many remarkable discoveries.  Being (in spite of his conviction to the contrary) a Jewdwine rather than a Harden, he had felt a certain malignant but voluptuous satisfaction in drawing the attention of the Master of Lazarus to this curious lapse in the family tradition.  Now in the opinion of the Master of Lazarus the feminine intellect was simply a contradiction in terms.  Having engaged the best masters in the county, whose fees together with their fares (second class from Exeter to Harmouth) he had himself punctually paid, he had declined to take any further interest in his grand-daughter.  He had no objection to her taking up music, a study which, being no musician, he was unable to regard as in any sense intellectual.  He supported his view by frequent allusions to the brainlessness of song-birds; in fact, he had been always a little bitter on the subject, having before his eyes the flagrant instance of his son Frederick.