had scarcely as yet perceived more in relation to her than that he was
legally accountable for her existence, and bound to give her shelter
and food. If he had questioned himself on the matter, he would have
replied that love was not wanting, only waiting upon her growth, and
the development of something to interest him.

Little right as he had had to expect anything from his first marriage,
he had yet cherished some hopes therein--tolerably vague, it is true,
yet hardly faint enough, it would seem, for he was disappointed in
them. When its bonds fell from him, however, he flattered himself that
he had not worn them in vain, but had through them arrived at a
knowledge of women as rare as profound. But whatever the reach of this
knowledge, it was not sufficient to prevent him from harbouring the
presumptuous hope of so choosing and so fashioning the heart and mind
of a woman that they should be as concave mirrors to his own. I do not
mean that he would have admitted the figure, but such was really the
end he blindly sought. I wonder how many of those who have been
disappointed in such an attempt have been thereby aroused to the
perception of what a frightful failure their success would have been
on both sides. It was bad enough that Augustus Greatorex's theories
had cramped his own development; it would have been ten-fold worse had
they been operative to the stunting of another soul.

Letty Merewether was the daughter of a bishop _in partibus_. She had
been born tolerably innocent, had grown up more than tolerably pretty,
and was, when she came to England at the age of sixteen, as nearly a
genuine example of Locke's sheet of white paper as could well have
fallen to the hand of such an experimenter as Greatorex would fain
become.