6

Mr. Norham shrugged his shoulders. As to his social life,' he said, there is not much mystery about that. He is a very rich young fellow, highly connected, and very fond of what he probably calls "life; and of this "life" he has seen, it seems, a great deal more than is good for him. Mr. Leigh, his father, was at Eton and Oxford with me, but in a very different set from mine. He had an immense opinion of his own importance, and in his choice of companions he was very grand and exclusive. He was always as pleasant and genial as possible when one had to speak to him; but I was not nearly a fine enough gentleman to be one of his intimates. Nothing, however, could be more kindly than the way in which he has written to me about this poor boy of his. I may as well read out to you, if you can wait a moment, that second letter that I told you of. "I want," he says,' Mr. Norham began reading, ""to explain Robert's case as frankly as I can to you. First, then, as to his scholarship, I can promise you that there you will have but little trouble with him. He has singular powers of application when there is nothing at hand to distract him; and if he could only apply himself for three months more, his tutor at Oxford assures me, he might take a first-class easily. The boy undoubtedly does know plenty; and under your care, with but little trespass on your time, he will be able to do such work as he yet needs for his degree. A quiet place at once makes him a student, just as a gay place makes him a man of fashion. These last words bring me to the sad confession I must make to you. I am not a strait-laced man, but yet my poor boy has indeed contrived to sadden me. Fashion-yes, it is a good thing in itself, but Robert has seen too much of it, and too early. He has been living a life, during the last two years, of almost ceaseless excitement ; and of this one result has been that he has lost his self-restraint in the matter of drinking. That special evil has not gone far; all he wants, so far as this goes, is some months of careful watching. But what has really made it advisable that he should leave Oxford till next October has been an entanglement relating to an unhappy girl Mr. Norham here stopped reading abruptly, and with the air of a man who has overshot his mark. Well,' he said, and so on, and so on. I find that this was not the note I was thinking of. You see, however, what is the gist of it. I don't think it is fair to the boy to go any further into particulars.'

'Don't stop,' said Mrs. Norham, in a voice of sudden interest. 'Pray let me hear the whole of it.'

But her husband was quite obdurate. It is not fair to the boy,' he said. Even his father confesses that he does not know the rights of the story. It is enough for us that he has had to be sent down for a term or two, and that we must do our best to sober and steady him.'

For Mrs. Norham, however, this was by no means enough. This

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suppressed misdemeanour of the expected pupil aroused in her breast two strong feelings in his favour-her curiosity and her sincere zeal for souls. Perhaps,' she said to her husband, you may be right in refusing to prejudice me. But it will not be very long, I can tell you, before I hear the whole story from himself.'

Mr. Norham had begun life as a clergyman. He was a man of respectable family, and he had enjoyed, in one of the pleasantest of the English counties, a charming family living, and the cure of eighty parishioners. His Christianity was cheerful and muscular; but not finding sufficient scope for its exercise, he began to relieve his leisure by a study of modern science. The result of this was that he presently felt bound in conscience to resign his living, and soon after bound in convenience to resign his orders. He was not without a small fortune of his own, but, anxious to make some modest addition to it, he readily gained employment as an editor of school classics. Whilst in London, arranging this with the publishers, he made the acquaintance of his wife, who was at once the ornament and the oracle of a serious atheistic côterie. On his marriage he took a small house in Cumberland, close to the lake of Derwentwater; and finding that his wife, though an Agnostic on all other points that had no proof in experience, had yet a special faith in her own influence over young men's characters, he from time to time took charge of a backward or wayward pupil. These, hitherto, had caused Mrs. Norham some disappointment. She had been able to make little or nothing out of them; and since they could not, she was convinced, be possibly beyond her influence, she declared with a frown of pity that the poor things were below it. Robert Leigh, however, was, she gathered, of a higher type. He was just the subject she wanted. He would appreciate and so be swayed by her reasonings; and the farther he had gone wrong, the greater and more instructive would be her triumph in righting him.

The Norhams' cottage was one of the prettiest nests conceivable. A wooded hill rose close behind it, and in front its little garden sloped down to the lake. It was now the latter spring; as Robert Leigh drove at sunset from the Keswick station, the whole of the lovely country was seen to its best advantage: and when he saw how beautiful was his quiet land of banishment, his spirits, unforced, at once began to revive themselves, and were still in a pleasing flutter when he arrived at his tutor's door.

The process of dressing somewhat sobered him. He had time to look about him, and feel the want of several of his accustomed comforts. None of these things annoyed him; but they reminded him that he was in a strange place, with a new life before him. Descending, he found the little drawing-room empty; and as he looked about him the sense of strangeness grew stronger. The furniture, which was scanty and uncomfortable, was evidently in the purest

and severest taste, and seemed to be looking a mute reproof at anyone who should treat art flippantly. Books, English and foreign, lay about in numbers-they were Reviews, for the most part, dealing with scientific subjects; and on easels, in one of the corners, were three crude daubs in oil, of which the most prominent was labelled A Fugue in Four Colours.' Leigh was languidly wondering what the mistress of this apartment would be like, when the door slowly opened and Mrs. Norham entered.

She was a woman of about five-and-thirty. Her figure was slightly clumsy, and her features were not regular, but her complexion was soft and rich, her large grey eyes were intelligent, and her expression would have been pleasing but for its studied gravity. To be in keeping with this expression, she wore at the back of her head a comb with a gilt disc attached to it, which made her face look as though set in a tarnished aureole. She was dressed, in the same spirit, with the utmost primness of the modern artistic school. There was not a trace of finery about her; yet it seemed as if some obscure but aggressive principle was written in every fold of her drapery. Leigh, who had a critical eye for whatever pertained to women, could not help noticing that, prepared as she was for dinner, one of her nails retained on it some traces of ink; but, putting this aside, Mrs. Norham was a pleasant surprise to him. Mrs. Norham's impression of him was not quite so favourable. Just as her appearance was a mute polemic of art, so did Leigh's seem to her to be a mute polemic of fashion. The perfect ease of his address, too, was, she knew not why, discomposing to her; and she was annoyed to find herself, entirely against her will, slipping for self-defence into an occasional rudeness of manner. When Mr. Norham appeared, and the three went in to dinner, Leigh was even more unfortunate in his attempt to make conversation.

'Do you find much, Mrs. Norham,' he said, 'to amuse yourself with in the country?' Mrs. Norham gasped, stared at him, and at length said 'Nothing.'.

Leigh was surprised, but not in the least abashed. Surely,' he said, smiling, 'you do your resources an injustice. At any rate you have your painting.'

Art,' said Mrs. Norham, is pursued for other purposes than amusement. The series I am at present engaged on, I shall present to a school at Manchester that the children may be trained into a perception both of form and colour. Mr. Leigh, when people have occupation they have no time, they have no need, for amusement. You think, perhaps,' she went on, 'that that is a hard saying. Well, when occupation is properly motived, when action becomes rationally purposive, we can apply with accuracy a less forbidding name to it. We can call it functional amusement.'

That is rather a nice expression,' said Leigh.

Do you at all,' said Mrs. Norham,' 'realise the true meaning of it? I have written an entire essay to describe its fitness and its significance.'

'I used often,' said Leigh, 'to hear about it from my coach at Oxford.'

"Your what?' exclaimed Mrs. Norham, aghast.

'My coach-my crammer-my private tutor, I mean.'

"You weren't under the care of Mr. Biggins, were you?' said Mrs. Norham. Why, he is one of the most remarkable thinkers of this, or indeed of any, age.'

'That's the man,' said Leigh. I used to get on very well with him. He was rather too fond of talking of Herbert Spencer; and he was by way of having no religion. But he taught me a great deal, and he was very kind in giving me books to read. Do you know him?'

'Intimately,' said Mrs. Norham. He is one of my most constant and most appreciative correspondents. If you have been prepared by him, Mr. Leigh, when you and I come to talk together I have little doubt that you will understand me.'

'I'm sure I hope so, Mrs. Norham,' said Leigh, bowing slightly. And so you got that phrase "functional amusement " from Biggins, did you? For it was he who first invented it.'

Excuse me,' said Mrs. Norham, with a perfectly startling emphasis, Mr. Biggins did not invent it. He had nothing whatever to do with the invention of it; and when he first learnt it, it was an entirely new light to him.'

'I have no doubt you are right,' said Leigh. I am merely going by what he told me.'

'The man must be mad, if he told you so. The phrase-in which, by the way, a whole philosophy is crystallised-was my invention. It was I who communicated it to Mr. Biggins. In fact, he has hardly a thought or a theory which he does not owe to me. And pray what more of his speculations did he tell you were original with himself?'

Ah,' said Leigh, 'a light at last breaks on me. Biggins often used to say to me, "You may think that my theories are not practical; but the person I first learnt their force from was a true woman of the world, who understood the ways of it far better than you do, and who could, if she were here, turn you or me round her little finger." Little did I think then that I should one day have the pleasure of meeting her.'

Mrs. Norham was raised in a moment to the height of serious happiness.

Yes," she said, 'I am none other than that over-praised woman. But I may without vanity say that I have been a great assistance to Mr. Biggins. You see, if I am nothing else, I am a woman;

and my logical faculty, at least, was therefore far superior to his. I am reminded by this to tell you that Mr. Biggins, when first I knew him, was a very religious man, and thought of me just as you seem to think of him-that I quoted Herbert Spencer too much. He used to waste, if I recollect rightly, a good hour every day in praying.'

'Well,' said Leigh, he has little religion left by this time anyhow. And the way he spoke of religion was the thing I liked least about him. Of course everyone has a right to his own views; but I think it a pity that, in his position, he should have been perpetually sneering at beliefs which most of the young men about him thought closely connected with their duties.'

"Ah,' said Mrs. Norham, 'you are quite wrong there. The bitterness you speak of is very often most wholesome and most necessary. Mr. Biggins himself only the other day applied to me à propos of one of my own essays these lines, which you of course know, of Tennyson's:

Clear-headed friend, whose joyful scorn,

Edged with sharp laughter, cuts in twain
The knots that tangle human creeds.'

'Is that,' said Leigh, smiling, 'what you mean by functional amusement?'

Mrs. Norham repressed this flippancy with a frown, and continued. "Of course,' she said, this scorn and bitterness has to be carefully adapted to the needs of time and circumstance. My own use of it consists mainly of two assumptions—that those writing on the opposite side are either entirely ignorant or else entirely insincere. For instance, nothing has done the cause of Truth greater service than the assumption that all Jesuits are liars; and that all spiritual directors are men of profligate purpose.'

6 You, then,' said Leigh, are not religious yourself, are you?'

'That entirely depends, Leigh,' Mr. Norham here interposed, on what we mean by religion. If you mean by religion pulpits, and church vestments, and flowers put about upon altars, Mrs. Norham certainly is not religious. But if you mean by it an intention to do her duty, and work hard and well for a good purpose, then she very certainly is.'

Mrs. Norham, shall, I have
But let me tell you now what
The moon is full to-night,

'Mr. Leigh and I, my dear,' said no doubt, soon understand each other. I have thought of doing with him. and the air is warm; and if he has any curiosity to see the lake, I could take him out in the boat for an hour or so.'

Leigh had been dreading in silence the probable dulness of the evening; and this unexpected proposal was a very welcome surprise to him.

The night was indeed lovely, and as Leigh and his hostess issued