The vicar had never been satisfied with his daughter's course. Life, in his view, was too short and eternity too near to justify any one in pursuing even the most innocent and laudable object in such a manner as to unfit the soul for keeping steadily in view its highest interests, and to engross the mind and life so entirely as to shut all the doors of loving and Christian usefulness. While acknowledging the value of storing, cultivating, and enlarging the mind, he became daily more and more convinced that such mental improvement was becoming a special snare to the young and enthusiastic; beguiling them into the neglect of manifest duty, and into a refined and subtle self-worship, which, in the case of those who had set out on the narrow way, was changing the substance for a shadow, and destroying that peace which none can truly feel who rob their Saviour of the consecration of all that they have and are to his glory. But deeply as he deplored the change in his daughter's habits, and her withdrawal from first one good work and then another, he had not fully realised how it had come about, and the mischief it was doing to the body, mind, and soul of the child he loved so dearly. It was only gradually that she had relinquished first one useful occupation, and then another; and circumstances seemed at the time to make such withdrawal necessary. Then, too, his wife's reluctance to see that, after all, she had mistaken the path on which she should have encouraged her daughter to travel, had led her to make as light as possible of the evil effects, which were only too plain to others not so nearly interested in her child's well-being. She could not bear to think that, after all, Clara's pursuit of intellectual distinction was physically, morally, and spiritually a huge mistake, and that she was purchasing success at the cost of health and peace. "There was nothing seriously amiss with her," she would tell her husband, when he expressed his misgivings and fears; "she only wanted a little change; that would set her up: there was no real cause for anxiety. It would never do for Clara to be behind the rest of the girls of her age in intellectual attainments: it would be doing her injustice, for she was so manifestly calculated to shine; and if God had given her the abilities and the tastes, surely they ought to be cultivated. She could return by-and-by to her work in the Sunday- school and the parish. And then, how much better it was that she should be acquiring really solid and useful knowledge, which would be always valuable to her, than be spending her energies on any of the worldly or frivolous pursuits which were entangling and spoiling so many well- disposed girls in our day."