Maud, on the other hand, had come out to India with a very low opinion of herself and of her claims upon the good-will of society. At Miss Goodenough's establishment for young ladies, where her education had been completed, her shortcomings had been impressed upon her in a manner wholesome, perhaps, and necessary, but decidedly depressing. She had been haunted by the awful consciousness that she was a 'Tomboy.' Her general demeanour, her mode of expressing herself, her ignorance of many things with which no one ought to be unfamiliar, had been the object of the most unflattering comment. The elder Miss Goodenough--between whom and Maud there existed a real though somewhat fitful attachment--used to have her into a solemn little chamber and administer the most awful lectures on her sins of commission and omission, and the disgrace and suffering which they would justly entail. These interviews were generally tearful and tender; for Miss Goodenough, to whom Maud had been consigned as a child on her first arrival from India, loved her with a sort of rapture which made itself felt amid all the vehement fault-finding which Maud's delinquencies necessitated. Maud had always regarded the old lady in something of a maternal light, and never could be brought to abandon the familiar abbreviation of 'Goody,' by which she had been allowed, as a child, to address her instructress. She accepted her instructress's sentences accordingly with unquestioning faith and submission. The two used to weep together over Maud's shortcomings. She looked upon Miss Goodenough as a friend whose heart it was her unlucky fate to lacerate. Miss Goodenough regarded Maud as a creature whose alarming impulses and irregularities justified the darkest forebodings as to her future, and succeeded in infecting her pupil with some of her own apprehensions. Some judgment must, so both agreed, sooner or later overtake one whose shoulders seemed guided by a hidden law to unequal altitudes, whose toes defied every endeavour to keep them pointed in the conventional direction, and whose impetuous behaviour was constantly producing a scandal of more or less gravity. 'Dearest child,' Miss Goodenough would say, with an air of profound commiseration, 'if you could see how you look, with one shoulder up to your ears and the other near to what should be your waist!' This taunt particularly grieved Maud, for she felt bitterly that her form was unromantically plump, and not at all of the refined tenuity of several of her companions. 'My shoulders!' she would exclaim, with the tears in her eyes; 'I wish they were both at Jericho. I am sure I am made wrong, dearest Goody, indeed I am.' 'Then, my dear,' Miss Goodenough would say, not encouragingly, 'we should try all the more to remedy natural defects; at any rate, you might know your Bible. Now, dear Maud, your ignorance is, you know, simply shocking.'