The Bread-winners | Page 9

shop-keepers. The reports of the battles of the Polo Club
filled her with a sweet intoxication. She knew the names of the
combatants by heart, and had her own opinion as to the comparative
eligibility of Billy Buglass and Tim Blanket, the young men most in
view at that time in the clubs of the metropolis.
Her mind was too much filled with interests of this kind to leave any
great room for her studies. She had pride enough to hold her place in
her classes, and that was all. She learned a little music, a little 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