“Oh, yes!  I see,—­at the time of Waterloo.”

Mrs. Lewis looked at me again with the same knitted brow and flushed cheek as before.

“All you say is Greek to me.  I don’t know what malachite is, nor who Raphael is, nor who Psyche is, nor who Marie Louise is, scarcely who Napoleon, and nothing about Waterloo.  A pretty present to make to me, is it not?  I could make nothing of it.  To you it is a whole volume.”

I said, with some embarrassment, that it was easy to learn, and that if she—­that is, that women should endeavor to improve themselves, and so on.  She heard me through, and then said, dryly,—­

“How old were you when you were married?”

“I was nearly twenty.”

“Were you well-informed? had you read a great deal?”

“What one gets in a country-school,—­and being fond of reading;—­but then I had always been in an atmosphere of books; and one takes in, one knows not how, a thousand facts”—­

I stopped; for I saw by her impatient nodding that she understood me.

“Yes, yes.  I knew it must be so.  Now, if William would ever bring me books, instead of jewels, or talk to me and with me, I might have been a rational being too, instead of being absolutely ashamed to open my mouth!”

She clasped the jewel-case and went out; and I heard her chatting a minute after with some gentlemen in the house, as if she were perfectly and childishly happy.

IX.

How I wished I could give Mr. Lewis some hint of what had passed between his wife and myself!  But that I could not do.  Besides that it was always best to let matrimonial improvements originate with the parties themselves, I had an inability to interfere usefully.  I could talk to her a little,—­not at all to him.  He seemed fond and proud of her as she was, and her dissatisfaction with herself was a good sign.  It was strange to me, accustomed to intellectual sympathy, that he could do without that of his wife.  But I suppose he had come to feel that she would not understand him, and so did not try to hit her apprehension, much less to raise or cultivate her intellect.  He had lived too long at the South.

Her moral nature was very oddly developed, showing how starved and stunted some of the faculties, naturally good, become without their proper nourishment.  As, intellectually, she seemed not to comprehend herself, except that she had a vague sense of want and waste, so, from the habit of occupying herself with the external, she had not only a keen sense of the beautiful in outward form, but as ready a perception of character as could consist with a want of tact.  Adaptation she certainly had.  Tact she could not have, since her sympathies were so limited and her habit so much of external perception and appreciation.  All this desolate tract in her nature might yet possibly be cultivated.  But thus far it had never been.  Beyond a small circle of thoughts and feelings, she was incapable of being interested.  She didn’t say, “Anan!” but she looked it.