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.