When the two years’ educational course at Eastbourne was finished, Edna Sartwell returned to Wimbledon, and again took up her position in her father’s house. As time went on, Sartwell was quietly pleased to see that there was an absence of that friction between his women-folk which had been his ostensible reason for sending Edna away. He had had but faint hope that the interval of two years would soften his wife’s only partially concealed dislike for the girl; but, now that peace reigned over the household, he did not inquire too closely into the cause of the welcome change. He did not know his daughter now bore uncomplainingly what she had before rebelled against. Mrs. Sartwell’s attitude towards education in general was one calculated to discourage the friends of learning. She looked upon a course in school as a sinful waste of time and money. The Apostles, she held, had never even gone to a Board school, and who among present-day people were to be compared with the Apostles? Education was merely a pamperer of that deplorable pride which was already too great a characteristic of this conceited nation. She had many texts at her command which went to prove that too much learning was a dangerous thing, and these quotations she frequently presented to Edna, in the hope that many repetitions of them would mitigate, in some measure, the evil that was sure to follow a period spent at a fashionable and expensive school. Overweening pride was Mrs. Sartwell’s especial bugbear; it, more than anything else, was driving modern nations rapidly to perdition. She told Edna, sorrowfully, that she noticed an unwelcome change in her manner since her return from Eastbourne. The pride which aped humility was ever the most baneful variety of that detestable fault, and Edna’s silence in the face of good counsel showed that her pride had assumed the sullen type which is so difficult for a good woman to deal with. It was only when Mrs. Sartwell--offended by absence of retort and cheated out of her just due of argument by the silence of her adversary--threatened to lay before her husband the appalling results of over-education upon an already haughty nature, that some glimmer of the old rebellion flashed out between them; yet the rebelliousness, like the hauteur, had been changed by the two years’ residence at Eastbourne. That Edna was angry at this proposed appeal to her father, was evident; still there was a reserve and restraint in her indignation which Mrs. Sartwell could not fathom. The girl stood for a moment looking at her, then said very quietly: “My father has enough to worry him without being bothered by our small affairs. He thinks my two years’ absence has made you like me better than you did before I went away, and I wish him to continue thinking so.”