“Let us hope so.  For a wife, mother, and house-mistress to be racing after so many ologies, and ignoring her daily duties, is a spectacle of doubtful utility to me.”

To tell the truth, this want of domestic interest had often struck me also.  One day, as we were talking about my children, Lulu had said that she believed herself destitute of the maternal instinct; for although she liked to see the children, of course, yet she did not miss them when away from her.  And after the death of young Lewis, which happened while they were at Cuba, and which distressed my Johnnie so much that he could not for a long time bear either books or play, for want of his beloved playmate, his mother, apparently, did not lament him at all.

“I never liked to have him with me,” she said to me,—­“partly, I suppose, because he reminded me of Montalli, and of a period of great suffering in my life.  I should be glad never to think of him again.  But William seemed to love and pity him always.  Gave him his name, and always treated him like an only and elder son.  And William is fond of the little girls, too.  I don’t mean that I am not fond of them, but not as he is.  He will go and spend a week at a time playing and driving with them.”

Indeed, she very often reminded me of Undine in her soulless days.

As she scarcely went into society, during the absence of Mr. Lewis, Lulu had time for all this multifarious culture that I have been describing, and she was gradually coming also to reason and reflect on what she read and heard, though her appetite for knowledge continued with the same keenness.  Her artistic eye, which naturally grouped and arranged with taste whatever was about her, stood her in good stead of experience; and with a very little instruction, she was able to do wonders in both a plastic and pictorial way.

One day she showed me a fine drawing of the Faun of Praxiteles, with some verses written beneath.  The lines seemed to me full of vigor and harmony.  They implied and breathed, too, such an intimacy with classical thought, that I was astonished when, in answer to my inquiry, she told me she wrote them herself.

“How delighted Mr. Lewis will be with this!” I exclaimed, looking at the beautifully finished drawing; “to think how you have improved, Lulu!”

“You think so?” she answered, with glistening eyes.  “I, too, feel that I have, and am so happy!”

“I am sure Mr. Lewis will be so, too,” I continued, persistently.

She answered in a sharp tone, dropping her eyes, and, as it were, all the joy out of them,—­

“Surely, I have told you often enough that Mr. Lewis hates literary women!  I am not goose enough to expect him to sympathize with any intellectual pursuits of mine.  No.  Fatima in the harem, or Nourmahal thrumming her lute under a palm-tree, is his belle-ideale; failing that, a housekeeper and drudge.”

I cannot describe the scorn with which she said this.  She changed the subject, however, at once, instead of pursuing it as she would formerly have done, and soon after left me for a drive over Milton Hills with George, with a hammer and sketch-book in the chaise.