This was the most effectual appeal that could be made to Penelope; it silenced, but convinced her not. It is true that her home was irksome. It was annoying to her in spite of all her constitutional vivacity and acquired philosophy to be continually exposed to the open or covert reproaches of Mrs Greendale. For this very clever lady had exercised management in everything but in the government of her own temper. And true it is, though strange it may appear, that her own opinion of her own temper and habit of mind was exactly the converse of reality; so when we see our image reflected by a looking-glass, that which is our right hand appears as our left, and that which is our left appears as our right. Mrs Greendale thought herself a model of candour and good humour; and whenever she uttered reproaches against Penelope, which was not very seldom, she actually thought and believed that all the fault was in the young woman’s perverseness, vanity, or affectation, whereas the only fault was in her own distempered vision, which could see nothing good in her, against whom, for some unaccountable cause, she possessed a decided prejudice. For a mind thus constituted, there was obviously no remedy; Mrs Greendale could not profit by indirect hints, nor could she see in others of the same temperament a portraiture of herself. It was also in vain that Penelope attempted to please her; that was an absolute impossibility, and the dependent one had found it so by long and bitter experience. The poor girl therefore was not of opinion that she was burdensome to Dr Greendale, but she felt that Mrs Greendale was burdensome to her; she found that her elasticity of spirit was diminishing; she began to assume the air and aspect of one tried with far deeper troubles than the continual wearisomeness of undeserved reproaches. Though occasionally Dr Greendale had perceived something of this, and though he had given some gentle hints to that purpose to his better half, yet he had no idea of the extent to which the annoyance reached, and of the bitter pains of heart and spirit which it occasioned to his niece. The art of ingeniously tormenting was once made the subject of a lively little book, but the art is not to be learned; it comes as the spontaneous growth of the mind, and Mrs Greendale knew the art much better than the witty author of that treatise.