As a pupil, indeed, she found in me little food of complaint, but would be out with me for weeks at a time if Sir Michael received a letter from Ned out of his turn, as she counted, or one that covered more paper than her last. But I fearing her not at all, and she being a lady of high courage and loving fearlessness in another, by degrees she came to love me, and to forego much of her privilege of unreasoning displeasure. The manners in which she was bred were more akin to the severer model of the reign of the first Charles than proper to this lighter age; but she had never been wholly cut off from the great world, and, knowing well what was doing and what changes making, she professed inculcating a judicious modification of old and new, that should leave a young woman open neither to the ridiculous charge of aping her grandmother nor to the censure of shaping herself upon the frail and beautiful women of a dissolute Court. My wardrobe, too, at my father's desire, she took in hand. And I confess that this was my favorite branch of study with my new teacher; and when I remember the gowns that were made in Taunton and the two that were fetched all the way from London, and the changing, turning, fitting, shaping, and trying done at Royston by my lady, her woman, and myself, I am free to admit that this matter of gowns was perhaps for more in bringing about our lasting friendship than any other thing that passed between us. For here my lady was not, as in the more serious domain of manners, under a desire of reverting to the days of her own upbringing, displaying rather the perennial youth that, behind the deepening wrinkles of age, lurks ever fresh in the feminine heart. She was in the choice of my attire all for the newest mode, holding, she would say, each fashion as it arose right and seemly, if set out upon the person of one that had the wit and discretion to fit new forms to her own needs and the counsels of modesty. I wish I may have done a little to lighten for Lady Mary the tedium of those days while Ned was from home, since I am deeply her debtor, as a maid must be to her who takes up, in how slight soever a manner, the office of the mother she has lost.