educate her in a style befitting a young woman of gentle birth. Miss Stanhope’s views on education were decided and not at all involved. Every lady, she averred, should be able to speak French fluently, make her own underclothes, and be conversant with the writings of the best authors. Music—which she disliked—was left outside the category. She provided the child with a French governess, who was a beautiful needlewoman. The introduction to the authors would come later.

Olive remained under Madame Dupont’s tuition for twelve years. When she was seventeen she was sent to “finish her education” at Miss Talbot’s select Academy for Young Ladies at Brighton. This year was the happiest in Olive’s life. Not only was there a daily walk on the esplanade, from whence she gazed for the first time in her life at the marvel of the sea, but also she was permitted to take drawing-lessons. She had inherited three things from her father, the [Pg 21]first being his plainness of feature, the second his youthful heart, and the third his passion for drawing.

[Pg 21]

An extremely inefficient but well-meaning young man of impeachable character visited Miss Talbot’s Academy for Young Ladies twice a week, and instructed the pupils in this art. Chalk drawings from casts were the style in vogue. It was considered an extremely advanced style. The chalk was kept in small glass tubes, it was shaken on to a pad, and applied to the paper with leather stumps, in the manner known as stippling. The poverty of the instruction, the horribly inartistic results produced, were unrecognized by Miss Mason. Chalk representations of plaster pears, apples, and floreate designs were produced by her at the rate of one a fortnight, and were laid carefully away in a large portfolio with tissue paper between to keep the chalk from rubbing.

Among the pupils at Miss Talbot’s Academy had been a girl—one Peggy O’Hea. Her father was a portrait painter of some note. Miss Talbot had hesitated at introducing this girl; daughter of a Bohemian—all artists were Bohemian in Miss Talbot’s eyes—into her select establishment, but the fact that her father was a yearly exhibitor at that most respectable institution the Royal Academy, and that her uncle was a Dean, induced Miss Talbot to overlook Bohemia. She [Pg 22]kept, however, a strict guard over Miss O’Hea’s conversation with the other pupils, a guard Peggy invariably evaded; and curled up on her bed in her nightdress, her arms clasped round her knees, she would hold forth in glowing terms regarding her father’s studio and the artists who frequented it. She had in her 

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