My Father, who had an extraordinary way of saying anything what Came into his mind, stated one day,—­the fashions, I must suppose, being under discussion,—­that he thought white the only becoming colour for a lady’s stockings.  The stockings of Miss Wilkes had up to that hour been of a deep violet, but she wore white ones in future whenever she came to our house.  This delicacy would have been beyond my unaided infant observation, but I heard Miss Marks mention the matter, in terms which they supposed to be secret, to her confidante, and I verified it at the ankles of the lady.  Miss Marks continued by saying, in confidence, and ’quite as between you and me, dear Mary Grace’, that Miss Wilkes was a ‘minx’.  I had the greatest curiosity about words, and as this was a new one, I looked it up in our large ‘English Dictionary’.  But there the definition of the term was this:—­’Minx:  the female of minnock; a pert wanton.’  I was as much in the dark as ever.

Whether she was the female of a minnock (whatever that may be) or whether she was only a very well-meaning schoolmistress desirous of enlivening a monotonous existence, Miss Wilkes certainly took us out of ourselves a good deal.  Did my Father know what danger he ran?  It was the opinion of Miss Marks and of Mary Grace that he did not, and in the back-kitchen, a room which served those ladies as a private oratory in the summer-time, much prayer was offered up that his eyes might be opened ere it was too late.  But I am inclined to think that they were open all the time, that, at all events, they were what the French call ‘entr’ouvert’, that enough light for practical purposes came sifted in through his eyelashes.  At a later time, being reminded of Miss Wilkes, he said with a certain complaisance, ’Ah, yes! she proffered much entertainment during my widowed years!’ He used to go down to her boarding-school, the garden of which had been the scene of a murder, and was romantically situated on the edge of a quarried cliff; he always took me with him, and kept me at his side all through these visits, notwithstanding Miss Wilkes’ solicitude that the fatigue and excitement would be too much for the dear child’s strength, unless I rested a little on the parlour sofa.

About this time, the question of my education came up for discussion in the household, as indeed it well might.  Miss Marks had long proved practically inadequate in this respect, her slender acquirements evaporating, I suppose, like the drops of water under the microscope, while the field of her general duties became wider.  The subjects in which I took pleasure, and upon which I possessed books, I sedulously taught myself; the other subjects, which formed the vast majority, I did not learn at all.  Like Aurora Leigh,

    I brushed with extreme flounce
  The circle of the universe,

especially zoology, botany and astronomy, but with the explicit exception of geology, which my Father regarded as tending directly to the encouragement of infidelity.  I copied a great quantity of maps, and read all the books of travels that I could find.  But I acquired no mathematics, no languages, no history, so that I was in danger of gross illiteracy in these important departments.