"And what is that worth," said she, stamping her foot, "which does not
recognize a soul at all? If he ever encouraged me to improve,--if he
ever read to me, or talked to me as he does to you, I might make
something of myself! I am in earnest. I do want to be something,--to
think, to learn, if I only knew how!"
Childish tears ran down her face as she spoke. Presently she went into
her room and brought me a set of malachite, in exquisite cameo-cuttings.
I took up a microscope, and began admiring and examining them,
recognizing the subjects, which were taken from Raphael's History of
Psyche.
"Beautiful! where did they come from?"
"William bought them of Lloyd, who had them long ago of the Emperor's
jeweller. They had been ordered for Marie Louise."
"And why didn't she have them, pray?"
"Just the question I asked. He said, 'Oh, because the Emperor was down
and the Allies in Paris, and the Emperor's jeweller nobody, and glad to
sell the cameos for one-third their cost, when they were finished.'"
"Oh, yes! I see,--at the time of Waterloo."
Mrs. Lewis looked at me again with the same knitted brow and flushed
cheek as before.
"All you say is Greek to me. I don't know what malachite is, nor who
Raphael is, nor who Psyche is, nor who Marie Louise is, scarcely who
Napoleon, and nothing about Waterloo. A pretty present to make to me, is
it not? I could make nothing of it. To you it is a whole volume."
I said, with some embarrassment, that it was easy to learn, and that if
she--that is, that women should endeavor to improve themselves, and so
on. She heard me through, and then said, dryly,--
"How old were you when you were married?"
"I was nearly twenty."
"Were you well-informed? had you read a great deal?"
"What one gets in a country-school,--and being fond of reading;--but
then I had always been in an atmosphere of books; and one takes in, one
knows not how, a thousand facts"--