“She registered at the desk as Mrs. Something,” rejoins the other.  “She only came in for one ride, and so they gave her a horse without looking up her reference, but one of the masters knew her real name.  Poor little goosey!  She has simply spoiled her chance of ever becoming a regular pupil, no matter how much she may desire it.  No riding master will give lessons to a person who behaves so.  He would lose more than he gained by it, no matter how long she took lessons.  And they know everybody in a riding-school, although they won’t gossip.  I’d as soon try to cheat a Pinkerton agency.”

“I know one thing,” Nell says, as you walk homeward:  “I’m going to take an exercise ride between every two lessons, and I’m going to ride a new horse every time, if I can get him, and I’m going to do what I’m told, and I shall not stop trotting at the next lesson, even if I feel as if I should drop out of the saddle.  I’ve learned so much from an exercise ride.”

XI.

  Ride as though you were flying.
       Mrs. Norton.

“Cross,” Esmeralda?  Why?  Because having had seven lessons of various sorts, and two rides, you do not feel yourself to be a brilliant horsewoman?  Because you cannot trot more than half a mile, and because you cannot flatter yourself that it would be prudent for you to imitate your favorite English heroines, and to order your horse brought around to the hall door for a solitary morning canter?  And you really think that you do well to be angry, and that, had your teacher been as discreet and as entirely admirable as you feel yourself to be, you would be more skilful and better informed?

Very well, continue to think so, but pray do not flatter yourself that your mental attitude has the very smallest fragment of an original line, curve or angle.  Thus, and not otherwise, do all youthful equestrians feel, excepting those doubly-dyed in conceit, who fancy that they have mastered a whole art in less than twelve hours.  You certainly are not a good rider, and yet you have received instruction on almost every point in regard to which you would need to know anything in an ordinary ride on a good road.  You have not yet been taught every one of these things, certainly, for she who has been really taught a physical or mental feat, can execute it at will, but you have been partly instructed, and it is yours to see that the instruction is not wasted, by not being either repeated, or faithfully reduced to practice.  Remember clever Mrs. Wesley’s answer to the unwise person who said in reproof, “You have told that thing to that child thirty times.”  “Had I told it but twenty-nine,” replied the indomitable Susanna, “they had been wasted.”  What you need now is practice, preferably in the ring with a teacher, but if you cannot afford that, without a teacher, and road rides whenever you can have them on a safe horse, taken from a school stable, if possible, with companions like yourself, intent upon study and enjoyment, not upon displaying their habits, or, if they be men, the airs of their horses, and the correctness of their equipment, or upon racing.