“And you are right.  I will be kind to him for your sake, dear.”

A slight cold confined Lucy to the house for three or four days after her uncle’s departure (by the by, I think this must have been the reason of David’s ill success in his endeavors to get an interview with her out of doors).

Thus circumstanced, ladies rummage.

Lucy found in a garret a chest containing a quantity of papers and parchments, and the beautifulest dust.  No such dust is made in these degenerate days.  Some of these MSS. bore recent dates, and were easily legible, though not so easily intelligible, being written as Gratiano spake.* The writers had omitted to put the idea’d words into red ink, so they had to be picked out with infinite difficulty from the multitude of unidea’d ones.

* “Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing . . . . his reasons are as three grains of wheat in two bushels of chaff.”

Other of the MSS., more ancient, wore a double veil.  They hid their sense in verbiage, and also in narrow Germanifled letters, farther deformed by contractions and ornamental flourishes, whose joint effect made a word look like a black daddy-long-legs, all sprawling fantastic limbs and the body a dot.

The perusal of these pieces was slow and painful; it was like walking or slipping about among broken ruins overgrown with nettles.  But then Uncle Fountain was so anxious to hook on to the Flunkeys—­oh, Ciel! what am I saying?—­the Funteyns, and his direct genealogical evidence had so completely broken down.  She said to herself, “Oh dear! if I could find something among these old writings, and show it him on his return.”  She had them all dusted and brought down, and a table-cloth laid on a long table in the drawing-room, and spelled them with a good-humored patience that belonged partly to her character, partly to her sex.  A female who undertakes this sort of work does not skip as we should; the habit of needle-work in all its branches reconciles that portion of mankind to invisible progress in other matters.

Besides this, they are naturally careful, and, above all, born to endure, they carry patience into nearly all they do.*

* At about the third rehearsal of a new play our actresses bring the author’s words into their heads, our actors are still all abroad, and at the first performance the breaks-down are sure to be among the males; the female jumenta carry their burden (be it of pig-lead) safe from wing to wing.

Lucy made her way manfully through all the well-written circumlocution, and in a very short time considering; but the antique [Greek] tried her eyes too much at night, so she gave nearly her whole day to it, for she was anxious to finish all before her uncle’s return.  It was a curious picture—­Venus immersed in musty records.

One day she had studied and spelled four mortal hours, when a visitor was suddenly announced—­Miss Dodd.  That young lady came briskly in at the heels of the servant and caught Lucy at her work.  After the first greeting, her eye rested with such undisguised curiosity on the “mouldy records” that Lucy told her in general terms what she was trying to do for her uncle.  “La!” said Eve, “you will ruin your eye-sight; why not send them over to us?  I will make David read them.”