One of his first acts, before he left town, had been to divest Nora of her shabby mourning and dress her afresh in childish colors. He learned from the proprietor’s wife at his hotel that this was considered by several ladies interested in Nora’s fortunes (especially by her of the subscription) an act of gross impiety; but he held to his purpose, nevertheless. When she was freshly arrayed, he took her to a photographer and made her sit for half a dozen portraits. They were not flattering; they gave her an aged, sombre, lifeless air. He showed them to two old ladies of his acquaintance, whose judgment he valued, without saying whom they represented; the ladies pronounced her a “fright.” It was directly after this that Roger hurried her away to the peaceful, uncritical country. Her manner here for a long time remained singularly docile and spiritless. She was not exactly sad, but neither was she cheerful. She smiled, as if from the fear to displease by not smiling. She had the air of a child who has been much alone, and who has learned quite to underestimate her natural right to amusement. She seemed at times hopelessly, defiantly torpid. “Heaven help me!” thought Roger, as he surreptitiously watched her: “is she going to be simply stupid?” He perceived at last, however, that her listless quietude covered a great deal of observation, and that growing may be a very soundless process. His ignorance of the past distressed and vexed him, jealous as he was of admitting even to himself that she had ever lived till now. He trod on tiptoe in the region of her early memories, in the dread of reviving some dormant claim, some ugly ghost. Yet he felt that to know so little of her twelve first years was to reckon without an important factor in his problem; as if, in spite of his summons to all the fairies for this second baptism, the godmother-in-chief lurked maliciously apart. Nora seemed by instinct to have perceived the fitness of not speaking of her own affairs, and indeed displayed in the matter a precocious good taste. Among her scanty personal effects the only object referring too vividly to the past had been a small painted photograph of her mother, a languid-looking lady in a low-necked dress, with a good deal of rather crudely rendered prettiness. Nora had apparently a timid reserve of complacency in the fact, which she once imparted to Roger with a kind of desperate abruptness, that her mother had been a public singer; and the heterogeneous nature of her own culture testified to some familiarity with the scenery of Bohemia. The common relations of things seemed quite reversed in her brief experience, and immaturity and precocity shared her young mind in the freest fellowship. She was ignorant of the plainest truths and credulous of the quaintest falsities; unversed in the commonest learning and instructed in the rarest. She barely knew that the earth is round, but she knew that Leonora is the heroine of _Il Trovatore_.