Frederick was no scholar.  He despised his forefathers as a race of pedants, and boasted that he never opened a book, barring the book of life, in which he flattered himself he could have stood a very stiff examination.  He used a certain unbowdlerized edition which he was careful to conceal from the ladies of his family.  Before he was forty Frederick had fiddled away the family tradition, and not only the family tradition, but the family splendour and the family credit.  When Lucia at seventeen was studying the classics under Horace Jewdwine, Frederick’s debts came rolling in; at about the same period old Sir Joseph’s health showed signs of failing, and Frederick took to raising money on his expectations.  He had just five years to do it in.

It was then that Lucia first began to notice a change in her grandfather’s manner towards her.  Sometimes she would catch his eyes fixed on her with a curious, scrutinizing gaze, and once or twice she thought she detected in them a profound sadness.  Whenever at these moments they happened to meet her eyes they were immediately averted.  Sir Joseph had not been given to betraying emotion, save only on points of scholarship, and it was evident that he had something on his mind.

What he had on his mind was the thought that at the rate Frederick was living he might at any moment cease to live, and then what would become of Lucia?  And what would become of the Harden Library?  What of the family tradition?  By much pondering on the consequences of Frederick’s decease Sir Joseph had considerably hastened his own.  Lucia knew nothing of all this.  She was only aware that her grandfather had sent for Horace Jewdwine on his death-bed.  What had passed between them remained known only to Horace.  But part of a sum of money left by Sir Joseph’s will towards the founding of a Harden scholarship was transferred by a codicil to Lucia for her education.

The task begun by Horace Jewdwine was continued by a learned lady, Miss Sophia Roots, B.A.; and Miss Roots did her work so well that when Sir Frederick assumed his rightful guardianship of his daughter he pronounced her the worst educated young woman in Europe.  Of all that Miss Roots had so laboriously imparted to her she retained, not a smattering, but a masterly selection.  And now at four and twenty she had what is called a beautiful view of life; with that exciting book which her father kept so sedulously out of her reach she was acquainted as it were through anthologies and translations.  For anything Lucia knew to the contrary, life might be all bursts of lyric rapture and noble sequences of selected prose.  She was even in danger of trusting too much to her own inspired version of certain passages.  But anthologies are not always representative, and nobody knew better than Lucia that the best translations sometimes fail to give the spirit of the original.