In this way, however, a great superficial improvement was notable in the girl. She learned in an inconceivably short time how to manage all the circumstances of her changed life, adapting herself to everything as one to the manner born. No temptation of being respectful to the butler ever came to Marion. She treated him and the rest of the fine servants as if they were cabbages; which was her rendering of the easy and genial indifference with which Mrs. Rowland received the services she had never been accustomed to consider extraordinary. Evelyn’s manner to the maid in her room, though she might not say a word to her, was the easy composure of a woman perfectly considerate and friendly, and ready on any occasion to show her natural interest in the fellow-creature so near to her, both by word and deed. But Marion’s indifference went the length of insult, though she had no intention of anything but to follow exactly her stepmother’s example. The demeanour of the one was just that kind of quiet familiar affability and ease which characterises a relationship in which there is no desire, on the part of the superior at least, for any more demonstration than is felt, or unnecessary intercourse; but Marion’s was a kind of brutality by which the inferior was made to feel as if she had no existence at all except as a ministrant to certain wants. Thus the little girl achieved that polish of the Tartar, which, when scratched, shows the savage through. Archie was not at all of this kind. And sometimes when Evelyn looked up suddenly and found him with his averted head, shoulder turned the side she was sitting on, and blank of dull opposition, she felt it almost a relief. Now and then some sentiment on her part, something quite unthought of which she said or did, and which probably had no connection whatever with himself, would make him look full at her with those eyes which Rowland had called his mother’s eyes--the honest soft blue, not too profound, but clear as the sky, in which at least the perception of the heart was not wanting, whether it was accompanied or not by any higher light of the spirit. What Archie knew or did not know it was difficult to say, for he never spoke when he could help it, and then chiefly in answer to questions which were seldom of an intellectual kind. Something had been said at first about the University, or rather, as both Archie and his father called it, “the College,” which meant, as Evelyn came slowly to understand, the same thing--only so far different that Glasgow or Edinburgh was the University meant, and not Oxford or Cambridge. That his son should go to “the College” had been Rowland’s intent, but the idea seemed to drop all the more completely, of course, that it was the summer vacation, and nothing could be done for the moment. Archie, however, instead of exerting himself like Marion to acquire a new, if it should happen to be a fictitious standing ground, remained a sort of unknown quantity in his father’s house.