Many of us know that teaching chess is no sinecure. The _alumnus_ who refuses to accept the rules as they stand; who wants to know why the pawns may not move backwards; why the pieces may not jump over, like in draughts; why the queen should have such absurd latitude; who thinks all the black pieces should remain on the black squares, and _per contra_--how well we know him! And the difficulty a peculiar class of intellect has in mastering the knight's move, condemning it on its merits, as too much like squinting, or italics! And another yet, which, on being shown how to make a particular move, makes it, and says contentiously: "Well!--I don't see anything so very clever in that." Miss Arkroyd did not quite do any of these things, but she was nearly as bad. She remembered the moves, in the abstract, but forgot which of the pieces made them; and this answered as well as forgetting the moves for all purposes of confusion. With so beautiful a hand it couldn't matter how much she fingered the pieces. And Mr. Challis seemed very contented. The instruction was a farce, but it served its turn, and a sort of appearance of a game developed while the rain outside came steadily down, and checkmated everyone in the house. Desultory chat, in which the question, "Whose move is it?" frequently occurred, helped Challis to a further insight into family conditions and local history. _En revanche_ the young lady added to her impressions of Challis's own domestic circumstances and his literary career, and found that an image was forming in her mind of Mrs. Challis. It wasn't a beautiful image, but it was worthy. It was that of a good soul. But not a good sort of body--nothing so bad as that! She felt glad, for Challis's sake. A good soul and the best of wives; that kind of thing! You couldn't expect education of very finished achievement in those sort of people, in the class she came from. For Miss Arkroyd had got somehow a perfectly clear impression of a class undefinable, but homogeneous and recognizable by symptoms. A class that didn't dress for dinner, a class that liked potatoes in their skins as a palliative to cold moist roast mutton _d' obbligo_; and did not condemn, but merely looked coldly on, at _menu_'s and finger-glasses. A class whose males smoked pipes and whose females refused cigarettes; which, though its young learned French at school, condemned France as the most salient foreign incident on an incorrigibly foreign Continent, and a perfect moral plague-spot of unfaithful wives and husbands.