Tucked away in that little old dark manor house, whose stables alone were up to date—­three hours from London, and some thirty miles from The Wash, it must be confessed that her upbringing lacked modernity.  About twice a year, Winton took her up to town to stay with his unmarried sister Rosamund in Curzon Street.  Those weeks, if they did nothing else, increased her natural taste for charming clothes, fortified her teeth, and fostered her passion for music and the theatre.  But the two main nourishments of the modern girl—­discussion and games—­she lacked utterly.  Moreover, those years of her life from fifteen to nineteen were before the social resurrection of 1906, and the world still crawled like a winter fly on a window-pane.  Winton was a Tory, Aunt Rosamund a Tory, everybody round her a Tory.  The only spiritual development she underwent all those years of her girlhood was through her headlong love for her father.  After all, was there any other way in which she could really have developed?  Only love makes fruitful the soul.  The sense of form that both had in such high degree prevented much demonstration; but to be with him, do things for him, to admire, and credit him with perfection; and, since she could not exactly wear the same clothes or speak in the same clipped, quiet, decisive voice, to dislike the clothes and voices of other men—­all this was precious to her beyond everything.  If she inherited from him that fastidious sense of form, she also inherited his capacity for putting all her eggs in one basket.  And since her company alone gave him real happiness, the current of love flowed over her heart all the time.  Though she never realized it, abundant love for somebody was as necessary to her as water running up the stems of flowers, abundant love from somebody as needful as sunshine on their petals.  And Winton’s somewhat frequent little runs to town, to Newmarket, or where not, were always marked in her by a fall of the barometer, which recovered as his return grew near.

One part of her education, at all events, was not neglected—­ cultivation of an habitual sympathy with her poorer neighbours.  Without concerning himself in the least with problems of sociology, Winton had by nature an open hand and heart for cottagers, and abominated interference with their lives.  And so it came about that Gyp, who, by nature also never set foot anywhere without invitation, was always hearing the words:  “Step in, Miss Gyp”; “Step in, and sit down, lovey,” and a good many words besides from even the boldest and baddest characters.  There is nothing like a soft and pretty face and sympathetic listening for seducing the hearts of “the people.”