Page:Watch and Ward (Boston, Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1878).djvu/31

28 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