To her adopted mother her suggestions were equally pertinent.  She instructed Mrs. Lethbury in an improved way of making beef stock, and called her attention to the unhygienic qualities of carpets.  She poured out distracting facts about bacilli and vegetable mould, and demonstrated that curtains and picture-frames are a hot-bed of animal organisms.  She learned by heart the nutritive ingredients of the principal articles of diet, and revolutionized the cuisine by an attempt to establish a scientific average between starch and phosphates.  Four cooks left during this experiment, and Lethbury fell into the habit of dining at his club.

Once or twice, at the outset, he had tried to check Jane’s ardor; but his efforts resulted only in hurting his wife’s feelings.  Jane remained impervious, and Mrs. Lethbury resented any attempt to protect her from her daughter.  Lethbury saw that she was consoled for the sense of her own inferiority by the thought of what Jane’s intellectual companionship must be to him; and he tried to keep up the illusion by enduring with what grace he might the blighting edification of Jane’s discourse.

V

As Jane grew up, he sometimes avenged himself by wondering if his wife was still sorry that they had not called her Muriel.  Jane was not ugly; she developed, indeed, a kind of categorical prettiness that might have been a projection of her mind.  She had a creditable collection of features, but one had to take an inventory of them to find out that she was good-looking.  The fusing grace had been omitted.

Mrs. Lethbury took a touching pride in her daughter’s first steps in the world.  She expected Jane to take by her complexion those whom she did not capture by her learning.  But Jane’s rosy freshness did not work any perceptible ravages.  Whether the young men guessed the axioms on her lips and detected the encyclopaedia in her eye, or whether they simply found no intrinsic interest in these features, certain it is, that, in spite of her mother’s heroic efforts, and of incessant calls on Lethbury’s purse, Jane, at the end of her first season, had dropped hopelessly out of the running.  A few duller girls found her interesting, and one or two young men came to the house with the object of meeting other young women; but she was rapidly becoming one of the social supernumeraries who are asked out only because they are on people’s lists.

The blow was bitter to Mrs. Lethbury; but she consoled herself with the idea that Jane had failed because she was too clever.  Jane probably shared this conviction; at all events she betrayed no consciousness of failure.  She had developed a pronounced taste for society, and went out, unweariedly and obstinately, winter after winter, while Mrs. Lethbury toiled in her wake, showering attentions on oblivious hostesses.  To Lethbury there was something at once tragic and exasperating in the sight of their two figures, the