She could neither write nor spell, but she could perform the most surprising tricks with cards. She confessed to a passion for strong green tea, and to an interest in the romances of the Sunday newspapers. Evidently she had sprung from a horribly vulgar soil; she was a brand snatched from the burning. She uttered various impolite words with the most guileless accent and glance, and was as yet equally unsuspicious of the grammar and the Catechism. But when once Roger had straightened out her phrase she was careful to preserve its shape; and when he had decimated her vocabulary she made its surviving particles suffice. For the rudiments of theological learning, also, she manifested a due respect. Considering her makeshift education, he wondered she was so much of a lady. His impression of her father was fatal, ineffaceable; the late Mr. Lambert had been a blackguard. Roger had a fancy, however, that this was not all the truth. He was free to assume that the poor fellow’s wife had been of a gentle nurture and temper; and he even framed on this theme an ingenious little romance, which gave him a great deal of comfort. Mrs. Lambert had been deceived by the impudent plausibility of her husband, and had come to her senses amid shifting expedients and struggling poverty, during which she had been glad to turn to account the voice which the friends of her happier girlhood had praised. She had died outwearied and broken-hearted, invoking human pity on her child. Roger established in this way a sentimental intimacy with the poor lady’s spirit, and exchanged many a greeting over the little girl’s head with this vague maternal shape. But he was by no means given up to these thin-spun joys; he gave himself larger satisfactions. He determined to drive in the first nail with his own hands, to lay the smooth foundation-stones of Nora’s culture, to teach her to read and write and cipher, to associate himself largely with the growth of her primal sense of things. Behold him thus converted into a gentle pedagogue, prompting her with small caresses and correcting her with smiles. A moted morning sunbeam used to enter his little study, and, resting on Nora’s auburn hair, seemed to make of the place a humming school-room. Roger began also to anticipate the future exactions of preceptorship. He plunged into a course of useful reading, and devoured a hundred volumes on education, on hygiene, on morals, on history. He drew up a table of rules and observances for the child’s health; he weighed and measured her food, and spent hours with Lucinda, the minister’s wife, and the doctor, in the discussion of her regimen and clothing. He bought her a pony, and rode with her over the neighboring country, roamed with her in the woods and fields, and picked out nice acquaintances for her among the little damsels of the country-side. A doting granddam, in all this matter, could not have shown a finer genius for detail.