Theodora and Richard were at once drawn to each other--he prejudiced in her favour by Barbara, she proud of her new, handsome brother. She was a plain, good-natured, good-tempered girl--with red hair, which only her father and mother disliked, and a modest, freckled face, whose smile was genuine and faith-inspiring. Her mother counted her stupid, accepting the judgment of the varnished governess, who saw wonder or beauty or value in nothing her eyes or hands could not reach. Theodora was indeed one of those who, for lack of true teaching, or from the deliberateness of nature, continue children longer than most, but she was not therefore stupid. The aloe takes seven years to blossom, but when it does, its flower may be thirty feet long. Where there is love, there is intellect: at what period it may show itself, matters little. Richard felt he had in her another sister--one for whom he might do something. He talked freely, as became him at his father's table, and the conversation did not quite flag. If lady Ann said next to nothing, she said nearly as much as usual, and was perfectly civil; Arthur was sullen but not rude; Theodora's joy made her talk as she had never talked before. A morn of romance had dawned upon her commonplace life. Vixen gave herself to her dinner, and but the shadow of a grimace now and then reminded Richard of the old monkey-phiz. Having the heart of a poet, the brain of a scientist, and the hands of a workman--hands, that is, made for making, Richard talked so vitally that in most families not one but all would have been interested; and indeed Arthur too would have enjoyed listening, but that he was otherwise occupied. That he had to look unconcerned at his own deposition, while regarding as an intruder the man whose place he had so long in a sense usurped, was not his sorest trial: regarding as a prig the man who talked about things worth talking about, he could not help feeling himself a poor creature, an empty sack, beside the son of the low-born woman. But indeed Richard, brought face to face with life, and taught to meet necessity with labour, had had immeasurable advantages over Arthur. The younger insisted to himself that his brother could not have the feelings of a gentleman; that he must have poverty-stricken ways of looking at things. He could, it was true, find nothing in his manners, carriage, or speech, unlike a gentleman, but the vulgarity must be there, and he watched to find it. For he was not himself a gentleman yet.