A modern girl commanding a thousand modes of cultivation, until she is oppressed by them, will find it hard to comprehend the self-respect and satisfaction with which Lady Bell returned to her studies; her French—in which Mrs. Sundon was a better qualified assistant, so far as speaking went, than Mr. Greenwood at St. Bevis’s—her thrumming on a spinet, her warbling of “Hark, the lark,” and “Waft her, angels.” Mrs. Sundon kept up her connection with town and the world, and had not only fashions, but newspapers and parcels of books forwarded to her by the carrier and the bookseller in Lumley. The ladies were abreast of their times (in which the war with America was taking more and more serious proportions), and of the literature of the day. “Sir Charles Grandison” was becoming an oldish book, and “Evelina” had not yet come out. But Mr. Brooke’s “Fool of Quality” was making its mark, and was warmly welcomed as a step in the right direction by all good men and women, including Mrs. Sundon and Lady Bell. In sermons the ladies read Porteous or Blair. In poetry they studied Mason’s “Flower Garden” and Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village,” while in travels, Pennant’s “Tour” seemed to them to have extended to the extremity of the civilised world. The absence, except at short intervals, of even a provincial theatre, which figured so largely as an intellectual influence at the close of the last century, was supplied in a degree to Mrs. Sundon and Lady Bell. They had the vigorous notices and criticisms of the most popular plays and players in the town newspapers; so that even while living at a distance, the ladies could enjoy at second-hand the heroics of “Douglas” and the nonsense of “Polly Honeycomb.” Lady Bell made many charming new attainments, and that season at Summerhill was, after all, in the fullest sense, the spring-time of her life, when she was learning something new every day, and was fast budding into fresh promise. All Lady Bell’s fine-lady gifts and graces had been originally overmuch of the town, townish. But Mrs. Sundon had been a fine lady of the country, as well as of the town, and could lead Lady Bell into elegant rurality, and even inoculate the girl with a true love of the country and of country life. Under Mrs. Sundon’s superintendence, Lady Bell became a lady gardener, and advanced with rapid strides from an apprentice to a journeyman, until, in addition to her old power of embroidering facsimiles of leaves and flowers, she could make carpets and canopies of the plants themselves, hang the verandah with them, and grow living orange-trees in the window alcove of the sitting-room. She laid carnations and budded roses, and was as intent on getting seeds of Canterbury bells and slips of geraniums, as ever she had been on procuring patterns for aprons and chair-covers.