CHAPTER VI.  “LOVE SHALL BE LORD OF SANDY-SIDE.”

 “LOVE SHALL BE LORD OF SANDY-SIDE.”

During thirty years of the first half of this century Mrs. St. Alban’s finishing school for young gentlewomen was a famous institution of its kind. For she had been born to the manner of courts and of people of high degree; and when evil fortune met her, she very wisely turned her inherited social advantages into a means of honest livelihood. Aspatria was much impressed by her noble bearing and fine manners, and by the elaborate state in which the twelve pupils, of whom she was one, lived.

Each had her own suite of apartments; each was expected to keep a maid, and to dress with the utmost care and propriety. There were fine horses in the stables for their equestrian exercise, there were grooms 181 to attend them during it, and there were regular reception-days, which afforded tyros in social accomplishments practical opportunities for cultivating the graceful and gracious urbanity which evidences really fine breeding.

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Many of Aspatria’s companions were of high rank,—Lady Julias and Lady Augustas, who were destined to wear ducal coronets and to stand around the throne of their young queen. But they were always charmingly pleasant and polite, and Aspatria soon acquired their outward form of calm deliberation and their mode of low, soft speech. For the rest, she decided, with singular prudence, to cultivate only those talents which nature had obviously granted her.

A few efforts proved that she had no taste for art. Indeed, the attempt to portray the majesty of the mountains or the immensity of the ocean seemed to her childishly petty and futile. She had dwelt among the high places and been familiar with the great sea, and to make images of 182 them appeared a kind of sacrilege. But she liked the study of languages, and she had a rich contralto voice capable of expressing all the emotions of the heart. At the piano she hesitated; its music, under her unskilled fingers, sounded mechanical; she doubted her ability to put a soul into that instrument. But the harp was different; its strings held sympathetic tones she felt competent to master. To these studies she added a course of English literature and dancing. She was already a fine rider, and her information obtained from the vicar’s library and the Encyclopædia covered an enormous variety of subjects, though it was desultory, and in many respects imperfect.

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