Kitabı oku: «The Third Miss St Quentin», sayfa 7
Chapter Seven
An Invitation
The summer was gone; autumn itself was almost giving place to winter. Ella St Quentin looked out of the window one morning as she finished dressing, and shivered as she saw the grass all silvered over, faintly gleaming in the cold thin sunshine.
“How freezing it seems!” she said to herself. “I hate winter, especially in the country. I wish – if it weren’t for that old wretch I really think I would write to auntie and ask her to invite me for a week or two’s visit. It can’t be so cold, and certainly not so dull, at Bath as here. I do think I deserve a little fun – if it were even the chance of some shopping – after these last three or four months. To think how I’ve practised and bored at French and German – not that I dislike my lessons after all,” and she smiled a little at the consciousness that had she done so it would indeed have been a case of “twenty not making him drink.”
“These teachers are really very good ones, and I don’t dislike reading English with Ermine, either. If she were a teacher and not my sister, I could really get very good friends with her. But all the same —what a different life it is from what I expected. If auntie could see me in this horrid rough frock that makes me look as if I had no waist at all,” and Ella impatiently tugged at the jacket of the very substantial sailor serge which Madelene had ordered for the cold weather, “and in this poky room.”
For Ella was still “in the nursery.” She was not to inhabit her permanent room till the winter was over, for the chimney had been found to smoke, and there was a leakage from the roof which had left the wall damp. And Ella had caught a slight cold, thanks to her thin boots, which had alarmed her father quite unreasonably. So the decree had gone forth that in her present cosy quarters she was to remain till the milder weather returned, which gave her the delight of another grievance.
As she stood gazing out at the wintry landscape which to less prejudiced eyes would have been full of its own beauty, the prayers bell rang. Ella started – her unpunctuality had been a frequent cause of annoyance for several weeks after her arrival at Coombesthorpe, but, perverse as she was, the girl was neither so stupid nor so small-minded as to persist in opposition when she distinctly saw that she was in the wrong. So this short-coming had to a great extent been mastered.
She tugged at her belt, gave a parting pat to her hair, saying to herself as she caught sight of her reflection in the glass, “It certainly takes much less time to dress as I do now than in the old days,” and flew along the passages and down stairs just in time to avoid a collision with Mr Barnes, as, heading his underlings, he politely followed the long file of women-servants into the library, where Colonel St Quentin always read prayers.
Ella took her place by the window; outside, a cheery red-breasted robin was hopping about on the gravel, and the sunshine, which was gathering strength, fell in a bright ray just where the little fellow stood. It is to be feared that much more of her attention was given to the bird than to her father’s voice.
“What a little duck he is,” she exclaimed, as soon as prayers were over. “See, Madelene – ” and as her elder sister came forward with ready response, Ella’s face lighted up with pleasure. The whole world seemed brighter to her; so impressionable and variable was she.
“Yes,” said Miss St Quentin, “he is a dear. We can hardly help fancying it is always the same robin. For ever since Ermine and I were quite little there is one to be seen every winter on this terrace. It is here we have the birds’ Christmas tree, Ella – one of those over there. It is so pretty to see them. There are so many nice things in the country in winter – I really do not know sometimes which I like the best – summer or winter.”
Ella felt a little pang of self-reproach – she remembered how five minutes before she had been grumbling up in her own room.
“Madelene must be much nicer and better than I am in some ways,” she thought to herself; “perhaps I would have been like her if they had kept me with them, or had me back some years ago,” and the reflection hardened her again, just as the softer thought was about to blossom.
At that moment Colonel St Quentin’s voice was heard from the adjoining dining-room.
“Breakfast is ready and the letters have come,” he said.
“Nothing for me?” said Ermine; “what are yours, Maddie?”
“One from Flora at Cannes,” said Miss St Quentin, “two or three answers to the advertisement for a laundry-maid, and – oh, here’s something more interesting. The Belvoirs are giving a dance – on the 20th. Here’s the card,” and she tossed it over to Ermine, “and there’s a note from Mrs Belvoir, too, ‘to make sure of us,’ she says.”
“Colonel and the Misses St Quentin,” murmured Ermine, “that means – I suppose – ” and she looked up hesitatingly at Madelene.
“Oh,” said Madelene, “it means what you choose, in the country. It isn’t like London, where one has to calculate the inches of standing and breathing space for each guest.”
“It means of course,” said her father, “such of the Misses St Quentin as are – ‘out.’” He pronounced the last word with a good deal of emphasis, then turned to his coffee and his own letters as if the question were settled.
Ella had not lost a word. A flush of colour had come to her cheeks and a brightness to her eyes on first hearing her sister’s announcement.
“They can’t mean not to take me,” she said to herself. “Just at Christmas too – why, girls who aren’t a bit out go to Christmas dances.”
And Madelene, for her part, was wishing more devoutly than she had ever wished concerning a thing of the kind in her life, that she had not been so impulsive as to mention the invitation in her younger sister’s hearing.
“I only long for her to go,” she said to Ermine when they were alone. “I’d give anything if papa would let her. And I don’t see that it could do any harm – a Christmas dance is different, and really she has been good about her lessons, especially about her practising. Three wouldn’t be too many, to such old friends.”
“Not to go to the ball,” Ermine replied. “But I fancy they will want us to stay for a day or two. You see Mrs Belvoir says she will come over to make further arrangements. And three would be too many to go to stay. But Maddie, I – ”
“No. I know what you’re going to say, and you’re not to say it,” Madelene interrupted. “You are not to be the one to stay at home. You’re ever so much younger than I – ”
“One year, eleven months and a day,” said Ermine. “Twenty years – a hundred would come nearer it,” said Madelene. “I was born old and circumstances have not rejuvenated me. No – if we can get papa to agree to let Ella go, I shall stay at home. It stands to reason. I am getting to an age when I should not be expected to go on dancing.”
“Ah, well – we needn’t quarrel about it yet,” said Ermine lightly. “I am only afraid the occasion will not arise, and that papa will be inexorable. There was something far from propitious in the accent he put on that ‘out’ this morning.”
She was right; inexorable he proved. Yet the sisters went about it diplomatically enough. They said very little at first, and were careful not to fret the thing into a sore from the start, as is so often done, and for a day or two they congratulated themselves that their gently suggested arguments had carried weight. But when the following week Mrs Belvoir wrote to say she was driving over to settle about the day they would come, and how many nights they would stay, and to discuss the whole programme – then the bolt fell.
“Ella go? No, most certainly not,” said Colonel St Quentin. “I never thought of such a thing. I hope you haven’t been putting anything of the kind into her head?”
“We have not mentioned it to her since the morning when the first note came,” said Madelene. “That morning unluckily I spoke of it before her.”
“Why should you say ‘unluckily’? It is absurd to treat her in that way,” said her father. “There should be and there must be no question raised, in the faintest way even, of anything of the kind for her. She is not yet eighteen – why, Ermine never went out at all till she was nineteen – ”
“That was unusual however papa,” Miss St Quentin ventured to say.
“Well, what can be more unusual than Ella’s case? It calls for unusual treatment certainly. She has been most injudiciously brought up, I see it more and more clearly. A life of dependence – dependence on her own exertions not improbably – ”
“Oh, papa,” murmured Madelene reproachfully – “for which she is about as fit as – as that kitten of yours,” contemptuously indicating Ermine’s Persian cat, who had long left all kittenishness behind it, and was sleeping on the hearth-rug in calm placidity.
“Tartuffe is scarcely a kitten now, papa,” Ermine could not resist interrupting.
“Ermine!” said Madelene in a tone of remonstrance.
“And,” pursued Colonel St Quentin unmoved, “just as the silly child is settling down a little, you would go and spoil it all by stuffing her head with waltzing and admiration. No, no – I am surprised at you, Madelene, I really am. And if there were no other objection, there’s her health. You are afraid of her catching cold again if she changes her bedroom, and yet you would propose taking her off to a strange house, unaired beds possibly, and exposing her to the alternate heat and chills of a ball-room, and – ”
Colonel St Quentin was working himself up to thorough unreasonableness.
“We won’t say any more about it, papa,” said Madelene, decidedly. “We have said nothing to Ella, so you really needn’t be vexed about it.”
She refrained from adding, as she might have done, that the scare about Ella’s health had entirely originated with himself, and she was wise in so doing. What human being, man, woman or child, was ever rendered more amenable to reason by being “put in the wrong?”
“I mind it principally, of course,” she said to Ermine, “because it will seem to her that it is our doing – negatively at least. She will think that if we had begged papa to let her go he would have given in. And I haven’t, in the faintest degree, let her think that we disagree with him about it. It would alienate her still more from him, and, besides, it would be disloyal to papa.”
“And, besides,” added Ermine, “I hardly like to say so, but I doubt if Ella would believe our protestations. There is an element of suspiciousness in her character, which I don’t at all like in so young a person, and quite lately she has seemed to me to be wrapping herself up in it more and more.”
“Yes, she has been very cold and stand-off to us lately,” Madelene agreed, “ever since that unlucky morning when I blurted out about the Belvoirs’ dance.”
“She would have had to hear about it sooner or later,” said Ermine. “I don’t see that it would have made much difference.”
“We might have managed it more diplomatically. We might have told her we were going away for a day or two, and mentioned that there was to be a dance, incidentally,” said Miss St Quentin.
Ermine looked up at her, half amused, half distressed.
“My dear Maddie,” she said. “I do think you’ve got Ella on the brain. You mustn’t give yourself such a lot of trouble about her – beating about the bush and worrying lest she should be put out. It will become a kind of slavery. I almost feel inclined to speak to papa about it from your point of view.”
“No, no, you must not, Ermie,” her sister replied. “Papa is already irritated on the subject. It will come right in time, I dare say. I wish Aunt Anna were at home. She might have had some influence with papa about this dance. I do think he is making a mistake – I must tell Mélanie,” she went on, “that she need not do any more about the frock we were planning for Ella.”
“It’s half made,” said Ermine.
“Well, she must turn it into a dinner-dress. But there is no need for Ella to know about it at present. It would only tantalise her, poor little thing. When will Aunt Anna be back, Ermine? You heard from her last.”
“A few days before Christmas – that was all she said,” Ermine replied, “Philip will be coming about the same time. I wonder what papa wants us to do at Christmas, Maddie. Shall we go to Cheynesacre, do you think, or will they come to us?”
“I don’t know. If papa remains in his present mood, I should say neither,” Miss St Quentin replied with some asperity. “He would probably dislike the idea of Ella’s going there with us, and a party here would be as bad. And if he proposed such a thing as our going without her – well – I should certainly refuse. One must make a stand somewhere. How can he expect the child to get to love us?”
“Madelene is making quite a personal grievance of it,” thought Ermine. “I am much more concerned for her than for Ella,” – “It is very tiresome that this should have happened just now,” she said aloud. “For one thing, I did so want Philip to see everything harmonious when he came back.”
“So did I,” Madelene replied. “That is just another vexation.”
The subject of the Manor dance was never named in Ella’s presence, but she was quick enough to see that it was in contemplation for her sisters.
“Will they really go so far as to leave me all alone?” she said to herself. “It will be a scandal if they do. If I am to be distinctly treated in this way, ignored as if I were about seven years old – they should at least be consistent and get a governess to keep me company when they go off and leave me alone. As if either of them was ever treated so at my age! What can Madelene want to go to a dance for – I am sure I wouldn’t if I were as old as she – and really, sometimes lately since she has had this cross fit, she has looked thirty.”
It was almost true. Poor Madelene’s real distress of mind at the failure of all her hopes with regard to her half-sister, had preyed upon her. She was one of those much-to-be-pitied people who have but little spontaneous power of expressing their deeper feelings; indeed the more she felt the less she showed it, though her very silence and apparent indifference told their own tale to those who knew her well. Ermine had good reason for feeling at the present juncture much more concern for Madelene than for Ella.
A week or two passed, uncomfortably enough. The weather, as in England is often the case, seemed to aggravate the dreary uneasiness of the mental atmosphere at Coombesthorpe. It rained – a steady, pitiless winter rain – almost incessantly for a week. There was no possibility of walking or driving, and more than once Ella found herself seriously picturing in her own mind the life she might now, had she exercised some diplomacy, have been leading with Mr and Mrs Burton, with actual regret.
“At worst, I might have gone out sometimes. In a town however it rains one can always get out a little– and here,” – and she moved away with a gesture of something approaching despair, as her glance fell on the gravel paths sodden with rain, on the dripping trees, on the stretch of park beyond the garden, where faint mists or clouds – it was difficult to say which – hid the horizon, and made one feel as if shut in in a universe of hopeless grey.
In those days Ermine, it must be owned, was barely kind, certainly not sympathetic towards the girl. She was sorry for her in her heart, but this very feeling caused a certain irritation, for Ermine’s nature was more prejudiced than Madelene’s; she was vehement in her affections, and where these were strongly engaged, she was apt to be one-sided. In one direction the two younger Misses St Quentin got on well together – Ella had shown herself from the first an apt and interested pupil, and about this time Ermine, rather to her surprise, remarked a distinct increase in her zeal and attention.
“This composition of yours is really very good – very good indeed, Ella,” she said one morning when she had been looking over an essay of her young sister’s, compiled from notes of various writers on a certain period of history. “At your age I could not have done nearly so well.”
Ella’s eyes flashed, and there was a peculiar expression about her mouth – there was however a distinct mingling of satisfaction in her tone as she replied, though coldly.
“I am glad you approve of it. I am glad that you think it above the average of what girls of my age can do.”
“Decidedly,” said Ermine warmly. But as she glanced at Ella, she felt chilled again by the hard look on the round young face. She would have felt more than chilled had she read the thoughts at that moment passing through the girl’s brain.
“Yes,” she was saying to herself, “I am clever, and they can’t deny it. I shall learn all I can, and then, if this goes on, I shall run away and become a governess. I should manage it somehow, I am sure.” Two days later, as they were going to bed one evening, Madelene called her for a moment into her own room.
“Ella,” she said, “Ermine and I are going away from home for a few days. We are going to the Belvoirs; you may remember our speaking of the invitation one morning when it came. Mrs Belvoir was here the other day, but you were out. They are nice people, and they give nice dances. When – when you are out I shall like you to go there.”
“Then they didn’t invite me this time?” asked Ella drily.
“They invited ‘the Misses St Quentin,’” Madelene replied. “That meant what we liked to decide ourselves of course. It does not rest with outsiders to determine if a girl is out or not.”
“Of course not,” said Ella. “Then,” she went on, “will you tell me what you wish me to do while you are away? Am I to be quite alone with Mrs Green (the housekeeper) as chaperon?”
“No,” her sister replied, irritated by the scarcely veiled impertinence of Ella’s tone, though a moment before she had been longing to express to her some of her own feeling on the matter, “no, certainly not. I am writing to ask Miss Harter, Mrs Hewitt’s sister, whom you have seen at Waire, to come to stay with you.”
“Oh, indeed,” said Ella. Miss Harter was a pleasant, intelligent woman of thirty, whom Ella had found amusing and agreeable enough once or twice when she had met her, though it now suited her to describe her to herself as “a fusty old maid.”
Things both great and small but very rarely turn out as we expect. Two days before that on which Colonel St Quentin and his two daughters were to leave home he fell ill. His illness was not very serious, but sufficiently so to put his going out of the question. And as he said that the presence of a stranger in the house would be an annoyance to him, Miss Harter’s visit was put off, Ella manifesting livelier satisfaction at this than she had condescended for long to show about anything.
“What an incomprehensible girl she is,” said Madelene, as she and Ermine drove away. “I think I must give up trying to make her out.”
“I think her present phase is comprehensible enough,” Ermine replied. “She is violently in love with the idea of being a martyr, a suffering saint – no, neither of those expresses it quite. I have it – a Cinderella.”
A smile broke slowly over Madelene’s face.
“Yes,” she said, “that does express it. And we are the two cruel sisters – step-sisters, not half-sisters – a little poetic licence must here be allowed – going off in triumph to the ball! What a pity we have not got black corkscrew curls, Ermine, and an aigrette of three plumes apiece to appear in to-morrow evening!”
Chapter Eight
Left Behind
Ella spent the afternoon of her sisters’ departure in praiseworthy fashion. She acted up that is to say to the rôle, she had chosen to adopt. She prepared her lessons perfectly, she practised the most uninteresting of her piano exercises for an hour and a half; then she went up to her own room and looked out her oldest and shabbiest clothes, to see if she could not find anything in want of repair among them. It was not easy to do so. Stevens, who was an excellent needlewoman, kept Ella’s things by Madelene’s directions in perfect order, and it took some hunting on the girl’s part, before she succeeded in finding a stocking or two with incipient holes, or a skirt which looked as if it would not be the worse for a new braid round the edge.
On these she set to work, huddling herself up in shawl, for it was very cold, and sitting on the straightest-backed and hardest chair in her room.
“I wish they would give me an allowance for my clothes, however small,” she said to herself. “I could save out of it, I am sure, for I could dress much more plainly than I do even, which would certainly not distress my sisters. And I would have a right to what I saved in that way, surely. Every child can claim food and clothing from its parents till it is of age,” and she smiled bitterly. “Perhaps if I can make Madelene see that it would cost less to give me a small allowance, I may persuade her to make papa agree to it.”
Just then her meditations were interrupted by a knock at the door, and old Hester, the head housemaid, who had been deputed by Madelene to take care of Ella, so far as her material comforts were concerned, came in.
“Miss Ella,” she exclaimed, “whatever are you about? Sitting up here without a fire when it’s as cold as cold. Wouldn’t the Colonel be in a taking if he knew! You could have had a fire lighted if you’d only said the word. And there’s the library, and the little drawing-room as bright and cheery as can be, at your service.”
“I am busy working, thank you, Hester,” Ella replied primly. “I could not take work like this down stairs.”
She did not resent Hester’s reproaches, for the housemaid was an old servant, who had been at Coombesthorpe during the life of Ella’s mother, and was much attached to her.
Hester looked at what Ella was sewing.
“Darning stockings,” she exclaimed. “Now upon my word, I do call that too bad of Stevens. Not but what it’s a very right thing for a young lady, be she who she may, to know how to turn her hand to darning a stocking, but you’ve your studies, my dear, and other things to see to, and – ”
“It’s – it’s not exactly Stevens’ fault, Hester,” said Ella, too honest to leave Hester under such a mistaken idea. “She does mend all my things; it is not often she overlooks a hole. But I prefer to do more myself, and I want to accustom myself to going without fires and little things like that, for there is no knowing how I may be placed some day, and I want to be independent.”
Hester looked at her in surprise and perplexity. She knew that the second wife had been portionless, and she knew too, though vaguely, that Coombesthorpe and the bulk of the family revenues had come from the mother of the two elder daughters – but she could not believe that they would ever allow their half-sister to realise this practically in any painful way.
“We none of us know how we may be placed any day for that matter, Miss Ella, my dear. The best of us is in God’s hands and subject to His will, and even if it seems hard we must bow to it. But – you’ve a good home and kind friends – it’s a sort of tempting of Providence like, for you to speak that way.”
She looked at Ella half-inquiringly as she spoke; she wondered how much “the child,” as she mentally called her, knew. “They might have left her in her innocence a bit,” she said to herself half indignantly. On her side Ella was struck by Hester’s tone.
“She speaks almost as she might if I had been an adopted child, with no real right here,” she said to herself. “It just shows – ”
“And of course, Hester,” she replied haughtily, “it must seem as if I were one of the last women in the world ever to have to think of managing for myself or earning my own livelihood, but there are things that it is better not to explain. I may have my own feelings.”
“To be sure,” Hester replied, more and more perplexed. “But any way, Miss Ella, you’ll let me light a fire for you. It’d be far from independent if you was to fall ill of a bad cold, and your papa ill already, and just for this day or two with no one but you to see to him.”
Ella started.
“I forgot,” she said. “I forgot about papa. Perhaps I had better go and see if there is anything I can do for him.”
She was not exactly to blame for this thoughtlessness. Since her coming to Coombesthorpe her relations with her father had continued uncertain and constrained, and Madelene had judged it better to trust to time to bring about a better state of things, for the least effort on her part to force this would have been at once perceived and resented by Colonel St Quentin.
“Don’t tell that child to look after me while you and Ermine are away,” had been almost his last words to Madelene before she left. “If she thinks of it of herself that would be a different matter.”
And in ordinary circumstances the chances are that Ella would not have gone near her father. But Hester’s words reminded her that he was ill, and her conscience struck her.
“I’ll go to papa now,” she said. “He is in the study, isn’t he, Hester? He was to get up after luncheon.”
“Yes, Miss Ella, you’ll find him in the study. But maybe he’s asleep. Tap gently at the door.”
Ella’s tap revealed the fact that her father was awake.
“Come in,” he said, his voice sounding rather sharp and irritable.
“Cross old thing,” muttered Ella to herself, “I wish I hadn’t come down. Can I do anything for you, papa?” she asked aloud as she entered the room. “Would you like me to read to you, perhaps?”
Colonel St Quentin was lying on a couch by the fire; his books and newspapers on a little stand beside him. He glanced at Ella hesitatingly. He was feeling very lost and dull without his two elder daughters, and his eyes were tired.
“No, thank you,” he began to say, but his tone was not very decided.
“I – I think I read aloud pretty well,” the girl went on. Her quick impressionable nature was touched by her father’s looks: he was very pale, and she knew that he had suffered a good deal. “How selfish of them to have left him,” was her next reflection. “Do let me try, papa,” she went on more eagerly and naturally, “it must be rather dull for you alone, when you can’t get about.”
“And for you too, my dear,” he said kindly. “What have you been doing with yourself all day – since your sisters left, I mean?”
Ella grew rather red.
“Oh,” she replied, “I’ve been practising, and doing my French and German – much the same as usual. And then I’ve been sewing.”
It did not sound very lively. The “much as usual,” struck Colonel St Quentin too, and again he glanced at his youngest daughter. It struck him that she looked paler and thinner than formerly, and less bright and spirited. The fact was that Ella was blue and pinched with having sat in her fireless room for more than an hour, but this her father did not know. He moved uneasily on his couch.
“You can read to me if you like,” he said. “I think I have exhausted the papers, but this book is rather interesting. Madelene is reading it to me but she can finish it to herself afterwards.”
Half pleased and half frightened, Ella took the book. She had done herself scant justice in saying she read “pretty well.” She read very well indeed, and at the end of three-quarters of an hour Colonel St Quentin looked up with real gratification.
“Thank you, my dear,” he said. “That is a good place to stop at, I think. I have enjoyed it very much. Now I shall rest a while, for I hope to be able to come in to dine with you. It would be too dreary for you all alone.”
Ella did not reply, but her father saw that her face flushed again a little.
“You are not looking as well as I should like to see you,” he said. “Do you not feel well?”
“Oh, yes,” said Ella, touched in spite of herself. “I’m quite well, thank you, papa, but,” and here, in spite of all her heroic resolutions to endure in silence, the girl’s impulsive nature burst out – “it is rather dull. I have tried to do as you wished about my lessons and practising, and I like them, but it is rather dull,” she repeated.
“While your sisters are away, you mean? Just this day or two?” asked Colonel St Quentin.
“No, I meant altogether,” answered Ella frankly. “I – I’ve been accustomed to more variety I suppose, and at auntie’s I wasn’t considered a mere child. I think it’s that that makes it seem so dull.”
Colonel St Quentin made no reply for a moment or two. He sat, leaning his head on his hand, considering deeply. It seemed as if what Madelene had tried to warn him of had come true. Had he made a mistake in the tone he had insisted upon being taken with Ella? He had never liked her so well as to-day, nor felt so drawn to her, and quite unreasonably he became almost inclined to blame his elder daughters for not “managing better.”
“I have given in to their wish that no formal explanations should be made to her, not,” they said, “till they had gained her affection and confidence.”
“I certainly don’t think they are much nearer doing so than they were the day she came. It is an uncomfortable state of things altogether,” he said to himself.
Suddenly he looked up.
“How old are you, Ella?” he said abruptly.
“Nearly eighteen, papa. I shall be eighteen in two months,” she replied promptly.
“That is seventeen and ten months,” Colonel St Quentin replied dryly. “Well now, my dear, you can run away. I think I shall manage to get into the dining-room by dinner-time.”
Ella went off.
”‘Run away,’ indeed,” she repeated to herself, “as if I were about three! I wonder he doesn’t ring for my nurse to fetch me.”
Still, on the whole, the interview with her father had raised her spirits.
“I almost think,” reflected Ella, “I almost think that if it were all to come over again, papa would tell Madelene I was to go. Nobody scarcely but would pity me, left here alone, and it would have seemed so much more natural for me to go than either of the others, who have had years and years of it. I’m quite sure, when I’m as old as Madelene I shan’t care about dances and things like that, especially if I’m an old maid.”
The evening passed tranquilly. Colonel St Quentin dined with his daughter, Ella greatly enjoying her seat at the head of the table. And after dinner they spent an hour together in the drawing-room, when Ella very prettily volunteered to play, for her father to judge of her improvement.
