When Evadne went to her own room on the evening made memorable by the twins' famous anthem, she was haunted by that word "ineffectual," which Mrs. Orton Beg had used. "Ineffectual genius"--there was something familiar as well as high sounding in the epithet; it recalled an idea with which she was already acquainted; what was it? She opened her "Commonplace Book," and sat with her pen in her hand, cogitating comfortably. She had no need to weary her fresh young brain with an irritating pursuit of what she wanted; she had only to wait, and it would recur to her. And presently it came. Her countenance brightened. She bent over the book and wrote a few lines, read them when she had blotted them, and was satisfied. "I have it," she wrote. "Shelley = genius of the nineteenth century--'Beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.'--_Matthew Arnold_." When she had done this she took up a book, went to the fire, settled herself in an easy-chair, and began to read. The book was "Ruth," by Mrs. Gaskell, and she was just finishing it. When she had done so she went back to the table, and copied out the following paragraph: "The daily life into which people are born, and into which they are absorbed before they are aware, forms chains which only one in a hundred has moral strength enough to despise, and to break when the right time comes--when an inward necessity for independent action arises, which is superior to all outward conventionalities." She stopped here, and pushed the volume away from her. It was the only passage in it which she cared to remember. She had lost the confidence of the child by this time, and become humbly doubtful of her own opinion; and instead of summing up "Ruth" boldly, as she would have done the year before, she paused now a moment to reflect before she wrote with diffidence: "The principal impression this book has made upon me is that Mrs. Gaskell must have been a very lovable woman." [Footnote: George Eliot thought so too, years before Evadne was born, and expressed the thought in a letter in which she also prophesied that "Ruth" would not live through a generation. The impression the book made upon Evadne is another proof of prescience in the great writer.] "The story seems to me long drawn out, and of small significance. It is full of food for the heart, but the head goes empty away, and both should be satisfied by a work of fiction, I think. But perhaps it is my own mood that is at fault. At another time I might have found gems in it which now in my dulness I have failed to perceive." Somebody knocked at the door as she blotted the words. "Come in, auntie," she said, as if in answer to an accustomed signal; and Mrs. Orton Beg entered in a long, loose, voluminously draped white wrapper. Evadne drew an easy-chair to the fire for her. "Sit down, auntie," she said, "and be cosey. You are late to-night. I was afraid you were not coming."