Before she was sent to Miss Marlett's, four years ere this date, Margaret Shields' instruction had been limited. "The best thing that could be said for it," as the old sporting prophet remarked of his own education, "was that it had been mainly eleemosynary." The Chelsea School Board fees could but rarely be extracted from old Dicky Shields. But Robert Maitland, when still young in philanthropy, had seen the clever, merry, brown-eyed child at some school treat, or inspection, or other function; had covenanted in some sort with her shiftless parent; had rescued the child from the streets, and sent her as a pupil to Miss Marlett's. Like Mr. Day, the accomplished author of "Sandford and Merton," and creator of the immortal Mr. Barlow, Robert Maitland had conceived the hope that he might have a girl educated up to his own intellectual standard, and made, or "ready-made," a helpmate meet for him. He was, in a more or less formal way, the guardian of Margaret Shields, and the ward might be expected (by anyone who did not know human nature any better) to blossom into the wife.
Maitland could "please himself," as people say; that is, in his choice of a partner he had no relations to please--no one but the elect young lady, who, after all, might not be "pleased" with alacrity.
Whether pleased or not, there could be no doubt that Margaret Shields was extremely pleasing. Beside her two shivering chamber-mates ("chamber-dekyns" they would have been called, in Oxford slang, four hundred years ago), Miss Shields looked quite brilliant, warm, and comfortable, even in the eager and the nipping air of Miss Marlett's shuddering establishment, and by the frosty light of a single candle. This young lady was tall and firmly fashioned; a nut-brown maid, with a ruddy glow on her cheeks, with glossy hair rolled up in a big tight knot, and with à smile (which knew when it was well off) always faithful to her lips. These features, it is superfluous to say in speaking of a heroine, "were rather too large for regular beauty." She was perfectly ready to face the enemy (in which light she humorously regarded her mistress) when the loud cracked bell jangled at seven o'clock exactly, and the drowsy girls came trooping from the dormitories down into the wintry class-rooms.