Lady Mary for some seconds yielded to an impulse quite unusual to her. “What can the shop possibly have to do--” she began, hastily, “with the Thornleigh affairs?” she added, in a subdued tone. “If it was our own little Molly, indeed, whom they all know--” “My dear Mary, they interest themselves in all your alliances,” said Mr. Tottenham, “and you forget that Gussy is as well known among them as you are. Besides, as Earnshaw says--Don’t go, Earnshaw; the night is young, and I am unusually disposed for talk.” “So one can see,” said Lady Mary, under her breath, with as strong an inclination to whip her husband as could have been felt by the most uncultivated of womankind. “Come and look at my prospectus and the course of studies we are arranging for this winter, Mr. Earnshaw. Some of the girls might be stirred up to go in for the Cambridge examinations, I am sure. I want you so much to come to the village with me, and be introduced to a few of them. There is really a great deal of intelligence among them; uneducated intelligence, alas! but under good guidance, and with the help which all my friends are so kindly willing to give--” “But please remember,” cried Edgar, struggling for a moment on the edge of the whirlpool, “that I cannot undertake to direct intelligence. I can teach German if you like--though probably the first German governess that came to hand would do it a great deal better.” “Not so, indeed; the Germans are, perhaps, better trained in the theory of education than we are; but no woman I have ever met had education enough herself to be competent to teach in a thoroughly effective way,” cried Lady Mary, mounting her steed triumphantly. Edgar sat down humbly by her, almost forgetting, in his sense of the comical position which fate had placed him in, the daily increasing embarrassments which filled his path. All the Universities put together could scarcely have made up as much enthusiasm for education as shone in Lady Mary’s pretty eyes, and poured from her lips in floods of eloquence. Mr. Tottenham, who leaned back in his chair abstractedly, and pondered his plans for the perfection of the faulty and troublesome little society in the shop, took but little notice, being sufficiently occupied with views of his own; but Edgar felt his own position as a superior being, and representative of the highest education, so comical, that it was all he could do to keep his gravity. To guide the eager uneducated intelligence, to discipline the untrained thought, nay, to teach women to think, in whose hands he, poor fellow, felt himself as a baby, was about the most ludicrous suggestion, he felt, that could have been made to him. But nothing could exceed the good faith and earnestness with which Lady Mary expounded her plans, and described the results she hoped for. This was much safer than the talk about little Mary Thornleigh’s marriage--or the unexplainable reasons which kept Gussy Thornleigh from