It was the first Latin Irene learnt, and its quaint phrasing to this day influenced her thoughts of mortality.  Standing by her mother’s grave, she often repeated to herself “seu potius exuviae,” and wondered whether her father’s faith in science excluded the hope of that old-world reasoning.  She would not have dared to ask him, for all the frank tenderness of their companionship.  On that subject Dr. Derwent had no word to say, no hint to let fall.  She knew only that, in speaking of her they had lost, his voice would still falter; she knew that he always came into this churchyard alone, and was silent, troubled, for hours after the visit.  Instinctively, too, she understood that, though her father might almost be called a young man, and had abounding vitality, no second wife would ever obscure to him that sacred memory.  It was one of the many grounds she had for admiring as much as she loved him.  His loyalty stirred her heart, coloured her view of life.

The ladies had some little apprehension that their young relative, fresh from contact with a many-sided world, might feel a dulness in their life and their interests; but nothing of the sort entered Irene’s mind.  She was intelligent enough to appreciate the superiority of these quiet sisters to all but the very best of the acquaintances she had made in London or abroad, and modest enough to see in their entire refinement a correction of the excessive sans-gene to which society tempted her.  They were behind the times only in the sense of escaping, by seclusion, those modern tendencies which vulgarise.  An excellent library of their own supplied them with the essentials of culture, and one or two periodicals kept them acquainted with all that was worth knowing in the activity of the day.  They belonged to the very small class of persons who still read, who have mind and leisure to find companionship in books.  Their knowledge of languages passed the common; in earlier years they had travelled, and their reminiscences fostered the liberality which was the natural tone of their minds.  To converse familiarly with them was to discover their grasp of historical principles, their insight into philosophic systems, their large apprehension of world-problems.  At the same time, they nurtured jealously their intellectual preferences, differing on such points from each other as they did from the common world.  One of them would betray an intimate knowledge of some French or Italian poet scarce known by name to ordinary educated people; something in him had appealed to her mind at a certain time, and her memory held him in gratitude.  The other would be found to have informed herself exhaustively concerning the history of some neglected people, dear to her for some subtle reason of affinity or association.  But in their table-talk appeared no pedantry; things merely human were as interesting to them as to the babbler of any drawing-room, and their inexhaustible kindliness sweetened every word they spoke.