positively self-satisfied like him. For that her mind was not active
enough.

If it seem, as it may, to some of my readers, difficult to believe
that she should have come to her years without encountering any
questions, giving life to any aspirations, or even forming any
opinions that could rightly be called her own, I would remind them
that she had always had good health, and that her intellectual
faculties had been kept in full and healthy exercise, nor had once
afforded the suspicion of a tendency towards artistic utterance in
any direction. She was no mere dabbler in anything: in music, for
instance, she had studied thorough bass, and studied it well; yet
her playing was such as I have already described it. She understood
perspective, and could copy an etching, in pen and ink, to a
hair's-breadth, yet her drawing was hard and mechanical. She was
pretty much at home in Euclid, and thoroughly enjoyed a geometric
relation, but had never yet shown her English master the slightest
pleasure in an analogy, or the smallest sympathy with any poetry
higher than such as very properly delights schoolboys. Ten thousand
things she knew without wondering at one of them. Any attempt to
rouse her admiration, she invariably received with quiet
intelligence but no response. Yet her drawing-master was convinced
there lay a large soul asleep somewhere below the calm grey morning
of that wide-awake yet reposeful intelligence.

As far as she knew--only she had never thought anything about
it--she was in harmony with creation animate and inanimate, and for
what might or might not be above creation, or at the back, or the
heart, or the mere root of it, how could she think about a something
the idea of which had never yet been presented to her by love or