It is not easy to say whether the process of emergence from the sheath of childhood, a condition that has characteristics more or less common to us all, is more interesting to feel than to observe.  In Christian’s case, the interest was felt exclusively by herself, her family being healthily absorbed in the conjugation of the three primary verbs, to be, to do, and to have, in relation, exclusively, to themselves, and that merely from the skin outwards.  Soul-processes and developments were unknown to them in life, and were negligible in books.  Lady Isabel pursued her blameless way, doing nothing in particular, diligently and unpunctually, and spending much time in writing long and loving letters to those of her family who were no longer beneath her wing, in that particular type of large loose handwriting whose indefinite spikes stab to the heart any hope of literary interest.  Who shall say that she did not do her duty according to her lights?  But she was certainly quite unconscious of such matters as soul-processes.

Alone of the Mount Music children, Christian was aware of an inner personality to be considered, some spirit that heard and responded to those voices and intimations that, as a little child, she had accepted as a commonplace of every day.  By the time that she was sixteen the voices had been discouraged, if not stilled, their intimations dulled; but she had discovered her soul, and had discovered also, that it had been born on the farther side of the river of life from the souls of her brethren, and that although, for the first stages, the stream was narrow, and the way on one bank very like that on the other, the two paths were divided by deep water, and the river widened with the passing years.

Richard, pursuing the usual course of Irish eldest sons, had adopted the profession least adapted for young men of small means, and large spending capacity, and had gone into his father’s old regiment.  John, the zealot of an earlier day, was at Oxford, considering the Church; Georgy’s career has been announced, and the remaining twin had, with the special predisposition of his family towards financial failure, selected the profession of land-agent, in a country in which peasant-proprietorship was already in the air, and would soon become an accomplished fact.

There remains, to complete the family history, Judith, and she, now aged twenty-one, was possibly the sole member of the house of Talbot-Lowry for whom a successful future might confidently be anticipated.  Judith, a buccaneer by nature and by practice, was habitually engaged in swash-bucklering it on a round of visits.  She was good-looking, tall, talkative, and an able player of all the games proper to the state of life to which she had been called.  She was a competent guest, giving as much entertainment as she received, being of those who contribute as efficiently indirectly, as directly, to conversation, and are normally involved in one of those skirmishes of the heart, that cannot