schoolmaster did not know Iris, nor did he desire to discover what she
was like, being wholly occupied with the study of himself. Strange and
kindly provision of Nature. The less desirable a man actually appears
to others, the more fondly he loves and believes in himself. I have
heard it whispered that Narcissus was a hunchback.

Then there was another pupil, a girl who was working her very hardest
in order to become, as she hoped, a first-class governess, and who,
poor thing! by reason of her natural thickness would never reach even
the third rank. Iris would have been sorry for her, because she worked
so fiercely, and was so stupid, but there was something hard and
unsympathetic in her nature which forbade pity. She was miserably
poor, too, and had an unsuccessful father, no doubt as stupid as
herself, and made pitiful excuses for not forwarding the slender fees
with regularity.

Everybody who is poor should be, on that ground alone, worthy of pity
and sympathy. But the hardness and stupidity, and the ill-temper, all
combined and clearly shown in her letters, repelled her tutor. Iris,
who drew imaginary portraits of her pupils, pictured the girl as plain
to look upon, with a dull eye, a leathery, pallid cheek, a forehead
without sunshine upon it, and lips which seldom parted with a smile.

Then there was, besides, a Cambridge undergraduate. He was neither
clever, nor industrious, nor very ambitious; he thought that a
moderate place was quite good enough for him to aim at, and he found
that his unknown and obscure tutor by correspondence was cheap and
obliging, and willing to take trouble, and quite as efficacious for
his purposes as the most expensive Cambridge coach. Iris presently
discovered that he was lazy and luxurious, a deceiver of himself, a