Gyp’s moral and spiritual growth was not the sort of subject that Winton could pay much attention to.  It was pre-eminently a matter one did not talk about.  Outward forms, such as going to church, should be preserved; manners should be taught her by his own example as much as possible; beyond this, nature must look after things.  His view had much real wisdom.  She was a quick and voracious reader, bad at remembering what she read; and though she had soon devoured all the books in Winton’s meagre library, including Byron, Whyte-Melville, and Humboldt’s “Cosmos,” they had not left too much on her mind.  The attempts of her little governess to impart religion were somewhat arid of result, and the interest of the vicar, Gyp, with her instinctive spice of scepticism soon put into the same category as the interest of all the other males she knew.  She felt that he enjoyed calling her “my dear” and patting her shoulder, and that this enjoyment was enough reward for his exertions.

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.