The career of Bertie La Vigne had been a varied one, as might have been
foreseen perhaps from her early manifestations and proclivities.
She came to me, while still we dwelt in the city of my birth, when she
was approaching her seventeenth year, and remained a twelvemonth under
my roof, engaged in the study of Shakespeare with that accomplished
_artiste_ Mr. Mortimer. She intended to pursue what gift she had of
voice and histrionic talent as a means of livelihood, she told me from
the first, and to get rid of the ineffable weariness and monotony of her
life at Beauseincourt as well.
The two motives seemed to me to be worthy of all praise. There are,
indeed, abodes that kill the soul as well as the body, and this was one
of them in my estimation, yet I remembered as a seeming inconsistency
that, when, in her sixteenth year, it was proposed that Bertie should
come to me for the purpose of attending schools for the accomplishments,
she steadily refused to do so.
Her sense of duty might have been at the root of this firm and
persistent refusal to accept from my hand a gift richer far than "jewels
of the mine"--the power of varied occupation--but something had secretly
whispered to me that this was not all on which her apparent
self-abnegation was based, and I think that I was right in my
conjecture.
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