The acquaintance with Miss Durham had wrought much good in Salome as well as in Philip. She had opened his eyes to see his ignorance of himself, and hers to her ignorance of the world. Salome’s previous existence had been within a narrow sphere. Shut off by peculiar circumstances from forming many acquaintances and having many friends, with her horizon contracted almost within the walls of the dingy and ugly red-brick house occupied by the Pennycomequicks, uncle and nephew, there can be no doubt but that she would in time have settled into a condition little superior to that of the Carisbrooke ass. Her mind would have trotted round and round in the same drum, and have accommodated itself without a murmur or a thought of resistance to it. In the course of years she would have become almost as ordinary, as petty-minded as the deceased Mrs. Cusworth. But contact with Miss Durham had startled her out of this intellectual donkeydom. She saw in the American girl a vivacity of interest, a breadth of view, a sparkle of intelligence, a receptivity for novel ideas, and a knowledge of the world and of the things in the world—the currents that circulated in it, the forces that propelled its waves and directed its tides, to which she had been completely strange. And this stimulated in her the desire to know. An American gentleman once said to the writer, ’We have no prejudices, therefore we are always learning.’ That is the secret of American success in every branch of activity. Self-conceit breeds pig-headedness, which raises mountains of prejudice in our way, preventing us from seeing, as the Germans have it, that there are men beyond these mountains. Salome had noticed that Miss Durham was able at once, and without effort, to arrest the interest and enchain the attention of Philip, and this she attributed to the possession of qualities in the Chicago girl which were dormant, if not non-existent, in herself. She had the shrewdness to perceive, and the good sense to acknowledge, her own ignorance and inability to take part in conversation when it turned on politics, natural history, on music, art, or social questions of the day. She could talk about recipes for tapioca and semolina puddings, what proportion of water should be put with milk for a baby, the delinquencies of servants, the sermons she heard, the hymns she sang in church, the cutting-out and style of a dress, but not on much beyond. Being humble-minded, she was ready to take to heart what she recognised, and she studied Miss Durham with attention, to ascertain the points in which she was accomplished above her own acquirements.