The Bread-winners | Page 9

drawing, a little Latin, and a little French--the French of "Stratford-atte-Bowe," for French of Paris was not easy of attainment at Buffland. This language had an especial charm for her, as it seemed a connecting link with that elysium of fashion of which her dreams were full. She once went to the library and asked for "a nice French book." They gave her "La Petite Fadette." She had read of George Sand in newspapers, which had called her a "corrupter of youth." She hurried home with her book, eager to test its corrupting qualities, and when, with locked doors and infinite labor, she had managed to read it, she was greatly disappointed at finding in it nothing to admire and nothing to shudder at. "How could such a smart woman as that waste her time writing about a lot of peasants, poor as crows, the whole lot!" was her final indignant comment.
By the time she left the school her life had become almost as solitary as that of the bat in the fable, alien both to bird and beast. She made no intimate acquaintances there; her sordid and selfish dreams occupied her too completely. Girls who admired her beauty were repelled by her heartlessness, which they felt, but could not clearly define. Even Azalea fell away from her, having found a stout and bald-headed railway conductor, whose adoration made amends for his lack of romance. Maud knew she was not liked in the school, and being, of course, unable to attribute it to any fault of her own, she ascribed it to the fact that her father was a mechanic and poor. This thought did not tend to make her home happier. She passed much of her time in her own bedroom, looking out of her window on the lake, weaving visions of ignoble wealth and fashion out of the mists of the morning sky and the purple and gold that made the north-west glorious at sunset. When she sat with her parents in the evening, she rarely spoke. If she was not gazing in the fire, with hard bright eyes and lips, in which there was only the softness of youth, but no tender tremor of girlhood's dreams, she was reading her papers or her novels with rapt attention. Her mother was proud of her beauty and her supposed learning, and loved, when she looked up from her work, to let her eyes rest upon her tall and handsome child, whose cheeks were flushed with eager interest as she bent her graceful head over her book. But Saul Matchin nourished a vague anger and jealousy against her. He felt that his love was nothing to her; that she was too pretty and too clever to be at home in his poor house; and yet he dared not either reproach her or appeal to her affections. His heart would fill with grief and bitterness as he gazed at her devouring the brilliant pages of some novel of what she imagined high life, unconscious of his glance, which would travel from her neatly shod feet up to her hair, frizzed and banged down to her eyebrows, "making her look," he thought, "more like a Scotch poodle-dog than an honest girl." He hated those books which, he fancied, stole away her heart from her home. He had once picked up one of them where she had left it; but the high-flown style seemed as senseless to him as the words of an incantation, and he had flung it down more bewildered than ever. He thought there must be some strange difference between their minds when she could delight in what seemed so uncanny to him, and he gazed at her, reading by the lamp-light, as over a great gulf. Even her hands holding the book made him uneasy; for since she had grown careful of them, they were like no hands he had ever seen on any of his kith and kin. The fingers were long and white, and the nails were shaped like an almond, and though the hands lacked delicacy at the articulations, they almost made Matchin reverence his daughter as his superior, as he looked at his own.
One evening, irritated by the silence and his own thoughts, he cried out with a sudden suspicion:
"Where do you git all them books, and what do they cost?"
She turned her fine eyes slowly upon him and said:
"I get them from the public library, and they cost nothing."
He felt deeply humiliated that he should have made a blunder so ridiculous and so unnecessary.
After she had left the school--where she was graduated as near as possible to the foot of the class--she was almost alone in the world. She rarely visited her sister, for the penury of the Wixham household grated upon her nerves,