THE DECEASED WIFE'S SISTER, AND MY BEAUTIFUL NEIGHBOUR. _IN THREE VOLUMES._ VOL. III. [Illustration: Logo] LONDON: RICHARD BENTLEY & SON, NEW BURLINGTON STREET. 1874. The Right of Translation is reserved. MY BEAUTIFUL NEIGHBOUR. CHAPTER I. I found Martelli to be more useful to me than I could have expected. He had called himself practical, and he was practical. He was used to the punctilious regularity of schools, to the difficult inattention of pupils; and the habits these experiences had engendered well qualified him in one sense for the post I had offered. In one sense I say: by which I mean my need of an influence to direct my studies and keep me to them. But in him I missed what I had sought, and would have taken in preference, could I have found. Sympathies he had in abundance, but they were commonplace. He shone indeed; but rather with the borrowed light of letters than the luminous atmosphere of imagination. He could not comprehend me, though he would never appear puzzled. He would miss a delicate implication. In taste he was a sensualist, esteeming the full-blooded, florid, and passionate conceptions of art above her chaste aerial hints and tender moonlit beauties. Yet he was a good and sound scholar. His knowledge of Greek and Latin was singularly exact. He was deeply read in modern literature; and his surprising memory enabled him to display to the utmost advantage the various and carefully stored treasures of his mind. But though his erudition might have enabled him to have edited with accuracy the most obscure work in the whole range of ancient literature, his imagination would not have yielded him five lines of poetry. When together in the library, he would often extort a smile from me by the recollection he excited of my school days. Brisk in his movements, energetic in his actions, pungent and austere in his resolute directions, he recalled to me a French tutor, whom, of all my early tutors, I most hated for his severity. But the task conned, the subject discussed, the book closed, his manner would change; he would be ceremoniously courteous, with almost a hint of obsequiousness in his behaviour, as though he wished me to understand that his sturdy discharge of his duty did not prevent him from appreciating the difference of position between us. I should have benefited more from his counsels had my thoughts been less preoccupied with the subject which was hardly ever absent from my mind.