The Heavenly Twins | Page 6

as
familiar as the striking of the hour--the striking of an hour that bore no
special significance for her, and therefore set no chord vibrating in her
soul. The thoughts of her mind deafened her heart to it as completely as
the thunder of a waggon had at the same time deafened the waggoner's
ears while the bells uttered their message above him. And so it was
with the doctor, overworked and anxious, hurrying on his rounds; the
grasping lawyer, absorbed in calculation, and all the other
money-grubbers; the indolent woman, the pleasure-seeker, and the
hard-pressed toiler for daily bread: if they heard they heeded not
because their hour had not yet come. At least this is what some thought,
who believed that for every one a special hour would come, when they
would be called, and then left to decide, as it were, between life and
death-in-life; if they accepted life, the next message would be fraught
with strength and help and blessing; but if they rejected it, the bells
would utter their condemnation, and leave them to their fate.

CONTENTS.
I. CHILDHOODS AND GIRLHOODS
II. A MALTESE MISCELLANY

III. DEVELOPMENT AND ARREST OF DEVELOPMENT
IV. THE TENOR AND THE BOY--AN INTERLUDE
V. MRS. KILROY OF ILVERTHORPE
VI. THE IMPRESSIONS OF DR. GALBRAITH

BOOK I.
CHILDHOODS AND GIRLHOODS.
The spring is the pleasantest of the seasons; and the young of most
animals, though far from being completely fashioned, afford a more
agreeable sensation than the full grown; because the imagination is
entertained with the promise of something more, and does not
acquiesce in the present object of the sense.--Burke on the Sublime.
I am inclined to agree with Francis Galton in believing that education
and environment produce only a small effect on the mind of anyone,
and that most of our qualities are innate.--Darwin.

THE HEAVENLY TWINS.
CHAPTER I.
At nineteen Evadne looked out of narrow eyes at an untried world
inquiringly. She wanted to know. She found herself forced to put
prejudice aside in order to see beneath it, deep down into the sacred
heart of things, where the truth is, and the bewildering clash of human
precept with human practice ceases to vex. And this not of design, but
of necessity. It was a need of her nature to know. When she came
across something she did not understand, a word, a phrase, or an
allusion to a phase of life, the thing became a haunting demon only to
be exorcised by positive knowledge on the subject. Ages of education,

ages of hereditary preparation had probably gone to the making of such
a mind, and rendered its action inevitable. For generations knowledge
is acquired, or, rather, instilled by force in families, but, once in a way,
there comes a child who demands instruction as a right; and in her own
family Evadne appears to have been that child. Not that she often asked
for information. Her faculty was sufficient to enable her to acquire it
without troubling herself or anybody else, a word being enough on
some subjects to make whole regions of thought intelligible to her. It
was as if she only required to be reminded of things she had learnt
before. Her mother said she was her most satisfactory child. She had
been easy of education in the schoolroom. She had listened to
instruction with interest and intelligence, and had apparently accepted
every article of faith in God and man which had been offered for her
guidance through life with unquestioning confidence; at least she had
never been heard to object to any time-honoured axiom. And she did, in
fact, accept them all, but only provisionally. She wanted to know.
Silent, sociable, sober, and sincere, she had walked over the course of
her early education and gone on far beyond it with such ease that those
in authority over her never suspected the extent to which she had
outstripped them.
It was her father who struck the keynote to which the tune of her early
intellectual life was set. She was about twelve years old at the time, and
they were sitting out on the lawn at Fraylingay one day after dinner, as
was their wont in the summer--he, on this occasion, under the influence
of a good cigar, mellow in mind and moral in sentiment, but inclining
to be didactic for the moment because the coffee was late; she in a
receptive mood, ready to gather silently, and store with care, in her
capacious memory any precept that might fall from his lips, to be taken
out and tried as opportunity offered.
"Where is your mother?" he asked.
"I don't know, father," Evadne answered. "I think she is in the drawing
room."
"Never say you think, my dear, about matters of fact," he