Lethbury was not unwilling to oblige her.  Somewhere in his mental lumber-room there rusted a theory of education such as usually lingers among the impedimenta of the childless.  He brought this out, refurbished it, and applied it to Jane.  At first he thought his wife had not overrated the quality of the child’s mind.  Jane seemed extraordinarily intelligent.  Her precocious definiteness of mind was encouraging to her inexperienced preceptor.  She had no difficulty in fixing her attention, and he felt that every fact he imparted was being etched in metal.  He helped his wife to engage the best teachers, and for a while continued to take an ex-official interest in his adopted daughter’s studies.  But gradually his interest waned.  Jane’s ideas did not increase with her acquisitions.  Her young mind remained a mere receptacle for facts:  a kind of cold-storage from which anything that had been put there could be taken out at a moment’s notice, intact but congealed.  She developed, moreover, an inordinate pride in the capacity of her mental storehouse, and a tendency to pelt her public with its contents.  She was overheard to jeer at her nurse for not knowing when the Saxon Heptarchy had fallen, and she alternately dazzled and depressed Mrs. Lethbury by the wealth of her chronological allusions.  She showed no interest in the significance of the facts she amassed:  she simply collected dates as another child might have collected stamps or marbles.  To her foster-mother she seemed a prodigy of wisdom; but Lethbury saw, with a secret movement of sympathy, how the aptitudes in which Mrs. Lethbury gloried were slowly estranging her from their possessor.

“She is getting too clever for me,” his wife said to him, after one of Jane’s historical flights, “but I am so glad that she will be a companion to you.”

Lethbury groaned in spirit.  He did not look forward to Jane’s companionship.  She was still a good little girl:  but there was something automatic and formal in her goodness, as though it were a kind of moral calisthenics that she went through for the sake of showing her agility.  An early consciousness of virtue had moreover constituted her the natural guardian and adviser of her elders.  Before she was fifteen she had set about reforming the household.  She took Mrs. Lethbury in hand first; then she extended her efforts to the servants, with consequences more disastrous to the domestic harmony; and lastly she applied herself to Lethbury.  She proved to him by statistics that he smoked too much, and that it was injurious to the optic nerve to read in bed.  She took him to task for not going to church more regularly, and pointed out to him the evils of desultory reading.  She suggested that a regular course of study encourages mental concentration, and hinted that inconsecutiveness of thought is a sign of approaching age.