So began the education of Matilda. At first he drew up, for his own use, a sort of curriculum--arithmetic, algebra, geography, history, literature, grammar, orthography--and a time-table, two hours a day for six days in the week, but he very soon found that she absolutely refused to learn anything that did not interest her, and that he had to adapt his time to hers. Sometimes she would come to him for twenty minutes; sometimes she would devote the whole afternoon to him. When they had galloped through Oman's "History of England" she declined to continue that study, and after one lesson in geography she burned the primer he had sent her out to buy. When he asked her where Ipswich was she turned it over in her mind, decided that it had a foreign sound and plumped for Germany. She did not seem to mind in the least when he told her it was in England, in the Eastern Counties. . . . On the other hand, when he procured their itinerary for the next few months from Mr. Copas and marked it out on the map for her, she was keenly interested and he seized on the occasion to point out Ipswich and, having engaged her attention, all the county towns of England and Scotland. "Where were you born?" she asked. He found the village in Lincolnshire. "And did you go to a boarding-school?" He pointed to Haileybury and then to Oxford. From there he took her down the river to London, and told her how it was the capital of the greatest Empire the world had ever seen, and how the Mother of Parliaments sat by the river and made decrees for half the world, and how the King lived in an ugly palace within sight of the Mother of Parliaments, and how it was the greatest of ports, and how in Westminster Abbey all the noblest of men lay buried. She was not interested and asked: "Where's the Crystal Palace, where they play the Cup-tie?"