Mrs. Mar was grieved to find that her only daughter had no conspicuous talents, and was not even a girl of spirit—lacked, moreover, the will to cultivate that affectation of being spirited, which goes in America by the name of “brightness.” But she was not a bad sort of little girl after all; she got her lessons, and played games with a certain boyish gusto, and gardened with a patient devotion that her mother thought worthy of a better cause. But Mrs. Mar consoled herself for the girl’s lack of brilliancy by reflecting that Hildegarde was probably going to be handsome and that men were great donkeys and might never find out that she was slow. Hildegarde herself was conscious of her shortcomings—without the knowledge overwhelming her. Life was going to be very good, even if she wasn’t at the head of the class, or a shining light at the school commencements. She had no talent for music, and quite as little for recitation. It was something to hear her saying, in the famous garden scene— “Geh’ falsche gleissnerische Königin Wie du die Welt so täusch’ ich Dich—” in a tone of unruffled courtesy and with a brow serene. When the fiery Madeleine Smulsky took her off with, “This is Hildegarde laying dark plots—now she’s doing foul murder,” and proceeded to translate her friend’s large tranquillity into the feverish terms of picturesque wickedness, the effect was distinctly diverting. Even Hildegarde laughed. For she got over “minding.” It was when she was quite little that she had suffered most, and from the scorn of her own family. Her brothers were both “such very bright boys,” and her mother she knew to be enormously clever. It had been painful to feel that beside these richly dowered ones, she was “next door to an idiot.” She made no outward struggle against the verdict of her family, accepting it as many a young creature will, without a doubt of its being as just as final. But, fortunately, hers was a nature too sane and sunny for her to run the risk many children do of coming nervously to dread, and so making true, a prophecy having no foundation in necessity. When she discovered that she had competent hands—hands with which she could perform all manner of pleasant domestic miracles—that gradually, and because of her, the house was transformed and the garden made to smile; that, moreover (assuring her of a hold upon the fine arts, too), she could tell ghost stories that made her school friends gibber with excitement, the girl felt agreeably conscious that her destiny after all was maybe larger than the family eye had been able to discern.