did not show any special power of reserve; many children brought up like
Molly will carefully conceal knowledge which they believe that those in
authority over them suppose them not to possess. Perhaps in Molly's case
there was an instinctive shrinking from exposing an ideal to scorn.
Perhaps there was a wholly unconscious want of faith in the ideal
itself, an ideal which had been built up upon one phrase. Yet the notion
of the beautiful, exiled mother, so cruelly concealed from her child,
was very precious, however insecurely founded. It must be concealed from
other eyes by mists of incense, and honoured in the silence of the
sanctuary.

The new governess, Miss Carew, was a very fair teacher, and she soon
recognised the quality of her pupil's mind. Mrs. Carteret was possibly a
little disappointed on finding that Miss Carew considered Molly to be
very clever, as well as very ignorant. The widow was herself accustomed
to feel superior to her own circle in literary attainments,--a sensation
which she justified by an occasional reading of French memoirs and by
always getting through at least two articles in each _Nineteenth
Century_. It was a detail that she had never cared for poetry; Sir James
Stephen, she knew, had also never cared to have ideas expressed in
verse. But she felt a little dull when Miss Carew and Molly discussed
Browning and Tennyson and De Musset. Miss Carew fired Molly with new
thoughts and new ambitions in matters intellectual, but also in more
mundane affairs. If it is possible to be in the world and not of it we
have all of us also known people who are of the world though not in it;
and Miss Carew was undoubtedly one of the latter. Her tongue babbled of
beauties and courts, of manners, of wealth, and of chiffons, with the
free idealism of an amateur, and this without intending to do more than
enliven the dull daily walks through Malcot lanes.