She learned by heart the nutritive ingredients of
the principal articles of diet, and revolutionized the cuisine by an
attempt to establish a scientific average between starch and
phosphates. Four cooks left during this experiment, and Lethbury
fell into the habit of dining at his club.
Once or twice, at the outset, he had tried to check Jane's ardor;
but his efforts resulted only in hurting his wife's feelings. Jane
remained impervious, and Mrs. Lethbury resented any attempt to
protect her from her daughter. Lethbury saw that she was consoled
for the sense of her own inferiority by the thought of what Jane's
intellectual companionship must be to him; and he tried to keep up
the illusion by enduring with what grace he might the blighting
edification of Jane's discourse.
V
As Jane grew up, he sometimes avenged himself by wondering if his
wife was still sorry that they had not called her Muriel. Jane was
not ugly; she developed, indeed, a kind of categorical prettiness
that might have been a projection of her mind. She had a creditable
collection of features, but one had to take an inventory of them to
find out that she was good-looking. The fusing grace had been
omitted.
Mrs. Lethbury took a touching pride in her daughter's first steps in
the world. She expected Jane to take by her complexion those whom
she did not capture by her learning. But Jane's rosy freshness did
not work any perceptible ravages. Whether the young men guessed the
axioms on her lips and detected the encyclopaedia in her eye, or
whether they simply found no intrinsic interest in these features,
certain it is, that, in spite of her mother's heroic efforts, and of
incessant calls on Lethbury's purse, Jane, at the end of her first
season, had dropped hopelessly out of the running.
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