Her mind was too much filled with interests of this kind to leave any great room for her studies.  She had pride enough to hold her place in her classes, and that was all.  She learned a little music, a little drawing, a little Latin, and a little French—­the French of “Stratford-atte-Bowe,” for French of Paris was not easy of attainment at Buffland.  This language had an especial charm for her, as it seemed a connecting link with that elysium of fashion of which her dreams were full.  She once went to the library and asked for “a nice French book.”  They gave her “La Petite Fadette.”  She had read of George Sand in newspapers, which had called her a “corrupter of youth.”  She hurried home with her book, eager to test its corrupting qualities, and when, with locked doors and infinite labor, she had managed to read it, she was greatly disappointed at finding in it nothing to admire and nothing to shudder at.  “How could such a smart woman as that waste her time writing about a lot of peasants, poor as crows, the whole lot!” was her final indignant comment.

By the time she left the school her life had become almost as solitary as that of the bat in the fable, alien both to bird and beast.  She made no intimate acquaintances there; her sordid and selfish dreams occupied her too completely.  Girls who admired her beauty were repelled by her heartlessness, which they felt, but could not clearly define.  Even Azalea fell away from her, having found a stout and bald-headed railway conductor, whose adoration made amends for his lack of romance.  Maud knew she was not liked in the school, and being, of course, unable to attribute it to any fault of her own, she ascribed it to the fact that her father was a mechanic and poor.  This thought did not tend to make her home happier.  She passed much of her time in her own bedroom, looking out of her window on the lake, weaving visions of ignoble wealth and fashion out of the mists of the morning sky and the purple and gold that made the north-west glorious at sunset.  When she sat with her parents in the evening, she rarely spoke.  If she was not gazing in the fire, with hard bright eyes and lips, in which there was only the softness of youth, but no tender tremor of girlhood’s dreams, she was reading her papers or her novels with rapt attention.  Her mother was proud of her beauty and her supposed learning, and loved, when she looked up from her work, to let her eyes rest upon her tall and handsome child, whose cheeks were flushed with eager interest as she bent her graceful head over her book.  But Saul Matchin nourished a vague anger and jealousy against her.  He felt that his love was nothing to her; that she was too pretty and too clever to be at home in his poor house; and yet he dared not either reproach her or appeal to her affections.  His heart would fill with grief and bitterness as he gazed at her devouring the brilliant pages of some novel of what she imagined high life, unconscious of his glance,