And yet, truth to tell, the thread of romance inwoven with the composition of Mirpah Madgin was a very slender one.  In so far she belied her own beauty.  For a young woman she was strangely practical, and that in a curiously unfeminine way.  She was her father’s managing clerk and alter ego.  The housewifely acts of sewing and cooking she held in utter distaste.  For domestic management in any of its forms she had no faculty, unless it were for that portion of it which necessitated a watchful eye upon the purse-strings.  Such an eye she had been trained to use since she was quite a girl, and Mirpah the superb could on occasion haggle over a penny as keenly as the most ancient fishwife in Eastbury market.

At five minutes past nine precisely, six mornings out of every seven, Mirpah Madgin sat down in her father’s office and proceeded to open the letters.  Mr. Madgin’s business was a multifarious one.  Not only was he Lady Chillington’s general agent and man of business, although that was his most onerous and lucrative appointment, and the one that engaged most of his time and thoughts, but he was also agent for several lesser concerns, always contriving to have a number of small irons in the fire at one time.  Much of Mr. Madgin’s time was spent in the collection of rents and in out-door work generally, so that nearly the whole of the office duties devolved upon Mirpah, and by no clerk could they have been more efficiently performed.  She made up and balanced the numerous accounts with which Mr. Madgin had to deal in one shape or another.  Three-fourths of the letters that emanated from Mr. Madgin’s office were written by her.  From long practice she had learned to write so like her father that only an expert could have detected the difference between the two hands; and she invariably signed herself, “Yours truly, Solomon Madgin.”  Indeed, so accustomed was she to writing her father’s name that in her correspondence with her brother, who was an actor in London, she more frequently than not signed it in place of her own; so that Madgin junior had to look whether the letter was addressed to him as a son or as a brother before he could tell by whom it had been written.

As her father’s assistant Mirpah was happy after a quiet, staid sort of fashion.  The energies of her nature found their vent in the busy life in which she took so much delight.  She was not at all sentimental:  she was not the least bit romantic.  She was thoroughly practical, and was as keen in money-making as her father himself.  Yet with all this, Mirpah Madgin could be charitable on occasion, and was by no means deficient of high and generous impulses—­only she never allowed her impulses to interfere with “business.”