He brought this out,
refurbished it, and applied it to Jane. At first he thought his wife
had not overrated the quality of the child's mind. Jane seemed
extraordinarily intelligent. Her precocious definiteness of mind was
encouraging to her inexperienced preceptor. She had no difficulty in
fixing her attention, and he felt that every fact he imparted was
being etched in metal. He helped his wife to engage the best
teachers, and for a while continued to take an ex-official interest
in his adopted daughter's studies. But gradually his interest waned.
Jane's ideas did not increase with her acquisitions. Her young mind
remained a mere receptacle for facts: a kind of cold-storage from
which anything that had been put there could be taken out at a
moment's notice, intact but congealed. She developed, moreover, an
inordinate pride in the capacity of her mental storehouse, and a
tendency to pelt her public with its contents. She was overheard to
jeer at her nurse for not knowing when the Saxon Heptarchy had
fallen, and she alternately dazzled and depressed Mrs. Lethbury by
the wealth of her chronological allusions. She showed no interest in
the significance of the facts she amassed: she simply collected
dates as another child might have collected stamps or marbles. To
her foster-mother she seemed a prodigy of wisdom; but Lethbury saw,
with a secret movement of sympathy, how the aptitudes in which Mrs.
Lethbury gloried were slowly estranging her from their possessor.
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