"I'll go and beg her pardon, dear Miss Ellen," said Eleanor penitently, and rushing out of the room, she met Madame in the passage, and we heard her pouring forth a torrent of apology and self-accusation in a style peculiar to herself. If in her youth and cleverness she was at times a little sharp-tongued and self-opinionated, the vehemence of her self-reproaches when she saw herself in fault was always a joke with those who knew her.
"Eleanor's confessions are only to be matched by her favourite Jeremy Taylor's," said Jack one day.
"She's just as bumptious next time, all the same," said Clement. He had been disputing with Eleanor, and the generous grace of meeting an apology half-way was no part of his character.
He had an arbitrary disposition, in which Eleanor to some extent shared. He controlled it to fairness in discussions with men, but with men only. With Eleanor, who persisted in thinking for herself, and was not slow to express her thoughts, he had many hot disputes, in which he often seemed unable to be fair, and did not always trouble himself to be reasonable.
By his own account he "detested girls with opinions." Abroad he was politely contemptuous of feminine ideas; at home he was apt to be rudely so.
But this was only one, and a later development of many-sided Clement.
And the subject is a digression, and has no business here.
ELEANOR'S THEORIES REDUCED TO PRACTICE--STUDIES--THE ARITHMETIC-MASTER.
Madame was not ungenerous to an apology. She believed in Eleanor too, and was quite disposed to think that Eleanor might be in the right in a dispute with anybody but herself. Perhaps she hoped to hear her triumph in a discussion with Mr. Henley, or perhaps it was only as a punishment for her presumptuous remarks that Madame started the subject on the following day to the drawing-master himself.
"Miss Arkwright says your trees are all one, Mr. Henley," she began. (Madame's English was not perfect.) "Except that the half are yellow and the other half blue. She knows not the kind even."
The poor little drawing-master, who was at that moment "touching up" a yellow tree in one of the younger girls' copies, trying by skilfully distributed dabs to make it look less like a faded cabbage-leaf, blushed, and laid down his brush. Eleanor, who was just beginning to colour a copy of a mountain scene, turned scarlet, and let her first wash dry into unmanageable shapes as she darted indignant glances at Madame, who appeared to enjoy her bit of malice.