back-stairs in an ordinary house, in Belgravia, in Bloomsbury, in the suburban villas, are so much less elevating that there is nothing notable or historical in them. And yet how can a woman, all alone in a schoolroom, keep from hearing what floats upward, keep from that curiosity which all human creatures share, in respect to the people whom she is meeting every day? The pitiful little records that form the chief interest of so many starved and impoverished lives afford often one of the saddest spectacles in existence. And the woman who is able to resist this tendency runs the risk of growing stoical, cynical, harsh, and contemptuous. A girl may go through a few years of it without suffering. If she is happy at the end, and is able to live her own life, she forgets the difficulties of the probation, and probably the strongest feeling in her mind is the sense of being neglected, justly or unjustly, which is very bitter yet evanescent. But a woman who goes on with it for life has a hard lot. Mademoiselle had carried on this profession for fifteen years, and she had no prospect but to continue it all her life. It had developed in her a sort of self-denied and reserved quietude, which was strangely out of accord with the natural vivacity which she had inherited from her French father, and which all the subduing influence of an English mother had not brought under. A foreign governess is so much worse than a native that she has not even possession of an independent and distinctive name. Miss Smith or Miss Jones is better off than the impersonal Mademoiselle or Fräulein, whose title is generic and official, to be transferred to her successor with an indifference to any individuality in it which, were it not the mere growth of unthinking custom, would be brutal. Perhaps the ladies thus officially addressed do not, among their many grievances, count this; but the special personage of whom we speak, who was in her soul a very proud woman, and possessed, as it happened, a _beau nom_, a fine, and ancient, and high-sounding name, did feel it, though she was one who never owned to any grievances, nor showed her dislike of any of the peculiar methods of English politeness in dealing with governesses. Her name was De Castel-Sombre, an old name of Béarn, from whence her family came: but her father had been the last of his branch of the house, and had fallen off from its spirit by becoming an artist, which, as he had no money to begin with, had cut him off entirely from the favour of the noble cousins who might have helped him on had he been without tastes of his own. Mademoiselle's pride, therefore, was purely visionary, and had nothing vulgar embodied in it. It was the refuge of a high mind, longing for everything that was excellent, yet attached by straitest bonds of necessity to the common soil. When Monsieur de Castel-Sombre died he left his wife with scarcely any money, two girls, and a number of unsold pictures, for which nobody cared.