This tutor committed the offence next day of showing he had a firm and easy seat in the saddle, which increased Lady Charlotte’s liking for him and irritated her watchful forecasts.  She rode with the young man after lunch, “to show him the country,” and gave him a taste of what he took for her variable moods.  He misjudged her.  Like a swimmer going through warm and cold springs of certain lake waters, he thought her a capricious ladyship, dangerous for intimacy, alluring to the deeps and gripping with cramps.

She pushed him to defend his choice of the tutor’s profession.

“Think you understand boys?” she caught up his words; “you can’t.  You can humour them, as you humour women.  They’re just as hard to read.  And don’t tell me a young man can read women.  Boys and women go on their instincts.  Egyptologists can spell you hieroglyphs; they’d be stumped, as Leo would say, to read a spider out of an ink-pot over a sheet of paper.”

“One gets to interpret by degrees, by observing their habits,” the tutor said, and vexed her with a towering complacency under provocation that went some way further to melt the woman she was, while her knowledge of the softness warned her still more of the duty of playing dragon round such a young man in her house.  The despot is alert at every issue, to every chance; and she was one, the wakefuller for being benevolent; her mind had no sleep by day.

For a month she subjected Mr. Matthew Weyburn to the microscope of her observation and the probe of her instinct.  He proved that he could manage without cajoling a boy.  The practical fact established, by agreement between herself and the unobservant gentleman who was her husband, Lady Charlotte allowed her meditations to drop an indifferent glance at the speculative views upon education entertained by this young tutor.  To her mind they were flighty; but she liked him, and as her feelings dictated to her mind when she had not to think for others, she spoke of his views toleratingly, almost with an implied approval, after passing them through the form of burlesque to which she customarily treated things failing to waft her enthusiasm.  In regard to Philippa, he behaved well:  he bestowed more of his attention on Beatrice, nearer Leo’s age, in talk about games and story-books and battles; nothing that he did when the girls were present betrayed the strutting plumed cock, bent to attract, or the sickly reptile, thirsty for a prize above him and meaning to have it, like Satan in Eden.  Still, of course, he could not help his being a handsome fellow, having a vivid face and eyes transparent, whether blue or green, to flame of the brain exciting them; and that becomes a picture in the dream of girls—­a picture creating the dream often.  And Philippa had asked her grandmother, very ingenuously indeed, with a most natural candour, why “they saw so little of Leo’s hero.”  Simple female child!

However, there was no harm done, and Lady Charlotte liked him.  She liked few.  Forthwith, in the manner of her particular head, a restless head, she fell to work at combinations.