It would be but a reasonable inference that such a father should possess something peculiar in the way of a child, and Joan Gildersedge might have been apostrophized as the supremest possible contrast to her sire. Under the gray thatch of the one lurked much that was ignoble in the mind—avarice, an ignorant insolence, a coarse and blasphemous infidelity. Zeus Gildersedge personified much that was brutally typical of a British Midas. His daughter, with a strong and innocent perversity of soul, might have given Shakespeare a Virgilia and to civilization a star that could have regenerated a decaying chivalry.
The girl had received no education in the scholastic sense. She had escaped certain of the tawdry and superficial embellishments of civilization. From her meagre mine of literature—meagre numerically, but boasting intrinsic opulence—the girl had culled a strange medley of facts and sentiments. Shakespeare had unbosomed to her a god-man speaking to a precocious child. She had dreamed through _The Faerie Queene_ and Tasso’s _Jerusalem Delivered_. History had bulked largely in her calendar. She could have described to you the campaigns of Julian the Apostate, the Pandects of Justinian, the life of Savonarola, done to death in Medicean Florence. She was innocently wise, yet supremely ignorant, nor had she ever entered a church. A pure pagan, religion had never created in her a false and penitential humility, an erotic brooding upon the supposed shortcomings of her own nature. She was cheerfully positive, not a mawkish and emotional negation of sense. With the ingenious idealism of a child she estimated the world generously and boasted of no instinctive cynicism. Evil was a quality to be studied vaguely and dispassionately in books. No harm had touched her heart, nor had she learned to mistrust others. She had read of murder, adultery, theft, and the like. She supposed these things to exist, yet even intuition had not prompted her to project sin into the narrow and visible world that girded her youth.
Fortunately for Joan Gildersedge, she had arrived at no candid comprehension of her father’s character. He was the only old man experience had as yet apportioned to her, and she could claim no examples to contradict the habitual surliness of age. Zeus Gildersedge’s perpetual plaint was that of dire poverty, a protestation that his daughter had come to consider as inevitable as sunrise. True, he was morose, shabby, hard, reticent, and unlovely. Yet these very shortcomings had no air of strangeness for the girl. She had grown up under the shadow of avarice and ethical annihilation, and had come to consider such things among the natural phenomena of nature. She was neither particularly happy nor particularly miserable. None of the common experiences of girlhood had been hers. She had known neither love nor sympathy, friendship nor pleasure, brimming life nor the lack of it. And yet in the May of her girlhood she evidenced the example of a soul evolving within itself, of an individuality bourgeoning spontaneously under the sun, a stately plant starting into purple and red amid ruins and solitude. Unconscious of the inevitable law working in her own being, she followed her fashionless instincts, unknown of others, unknown even of herself.