Her failure to express herself in an art had been a tragedy. From this
tragedy she turned, not with bitterness, but perhaps with an almost
fiercer energy, to Vere. Her intellect, released from fruitless toil,
was running loose demanding some employment. She sought that
employment in developing the powers of her child. Vere was not
specially studious. Such an out-of-door temperament as hers could
never belong to a bookworm or a recluse. But she was naturally clever,
as her father had not been, and she was enthusiastic not only in
pleasure but in work. Long ago Hermione, trying with loving anxiety to
educate her boyish husband, to make him understand certain subtleties
of her own, had found herself frustrated. When she made such attempts
with Vere she was met half way. The girl understood with swiftness
even those things with which she was not specially in sympathy. Her
father's mind had slipped away, ever so gracefully, from all which it
did not love. Vere's could grasp even an unloved subject. There was
mental grit in her--Artois knew it. In all her work until her
sixteenth year Vere had consulted her mother. Nothing of her child
till then was ever hidden from Hermione, except those things which the
human being cannot reveal, and sometimes scarcely knows of. The child
drew very much from her mother, responded to her enthusiasm, yet
preserved instinctively, and quite without self-consciousness, her own
individuality.

Artois had noticed this, and this had led him to say that Vere also
was a force.

But when she was sixteen Vere woke up to something. Until now no one
but herself knew to what. Sometimes she shut herself up alone in her
room for long periods. When she came out she looked lazy, her mother
thought, and she liked to go then to some nook of the rocks and sit