“You have, dear Angela,” he began, “been educated in a somewhat unusual way, with the result that, after ten years of steady work that has been always interesting, though sometimes arduous, you have acquired information denied to the vast majority of your sex, whilst at the same time you could be put to the blush in many things by a school-girl of fifteen.  For instance, though I firmly believe that you could at the present moment take a double first at the University, your knowledge of English literature is almost nil, and your history of the weakest.  All a woman’s ordinary accomplishments, such as drawing, playing, singing, have of necessity been to a great extent neglected, since I was not able to teach them to you myself, and you have had to be guided solely by books and by the light of Nature in giving to them such time as you could spare.

“Your mind, on the other hand, has been daily saturated with the noblest thoughts of the intellectual giants of two thousand years ago, and would in that respect be as much in place in a well-educated Grecian maiden living before the time of Christ as in an English girl of the nineteenth century.

“I have educated you thus, Angela, partly by accident and partly by design.  You will remember when you began to come here some ten years since—­you were a little thing then—­and I had offered to give you some teaching, because you interested me, and I saw that you were running wild in mind and body.  But, when I had undertaken the task I was somewhat puzzled how to carry it out.  It is one thing to offer to educate a little girl, and another to do it.  Not knowing where to begin, I fell back upon the Latin grammar, where I had begun myself, and so by degrees you slid into the curriculum of a classical and mathematical education.  Then, after a year or two, I perceived your power of work and your great natural ability, and I formed a design.  I said to myself, ’I will see how far a woman cultivated under favourable conditions can go.  I will patiently teach this girl till the literature of Greece and Rome become as familiar to her as her mother-tongue, till figures and symbols hide no mysteries from her, till she can read the heavens like a book.  I will teach her mind to follow the secret ways of knowledge, I will train it till it can soar above its fellows like a falcon above sparrows.’  Angela, my proud design, pursued steadily through many years, has been at length accomplished; your bright intellect has risen to the strain I have put upon it, and you are at this moment one of the best all-round scholars of my acquaintance.”

She flushed to the eyes at this high praise, and was about to speak, but he stopped her with a motion of the hand, and went on: