Theodora and Richard were at once drawn to each other. She was a plain, good-natured, good-tempered girl with red hair—which only her father and mother disliked—and a modest, freckled face, whose smile was genuine. She was proud of her new, handsome brother. Her mother considered her stupid, accepting the judgment of the varnished governess. Theodora was indeed one of those who continue to be children longer than most, but she was not therefore slow or dull. The aloe takes seven years to blossom, but when it does, its flower may be thirty feet long. Where there is love there is intellect—at what period it may show itself matters little. Richard felt he had in her another sister—one for whom he might do something.

He talked freely, as became him at his father’s table. If lady Ann said next to nothing, she said nearly as much as usual and was perfectly civil. Arthur was sullen but not rude. Theodora’s joy made her talk as she had never talked before. Vixen gave herself to her dinner, but the shadow of a grimace now and then reminded Richard of the old days in the library.

Having the heart of a poet, the brain of a scientist, and the hands of a workman—hands, that is, made for making—Richard talked so vitally that in most families all would have been interested. Indeed, Arthur would have enjoyed listening, but he was otherwise occupied battling his pride. He could not help feeling himself a poor creature beside the son of the low-born woman. He insisted to himself that his brother could not have the feelings of a gentleman, that he must have poverty-stricken ways of looking at things. He could, it was true, find nothing in his manners, carriage, or speech, unlike a gentleman, but the vulgarity must be there, and he watched to find it. For he was not himself a gentleman yet.

When they retired to the drawing room after dinner, and Richard had sung a ballad so as almost to make lady Ann drop a scale or two from her fish-eyes, Arthur went out of the room stung with envy, and not ashamed of it. The thing most alien to the true idea of humanity is the notion that our well-being lies in surpassing our fellows. We have to rise above ourselves, not above our neighbours, to take all the good of them, not from them, and give them all our good in return. That which cannot be freely shared can never be possessed.

Arthur went to his room with a gnawing at his heart. Not merely must he knock under to the foundling, but confess that the foundling could do most things better than he and was his superior, in accomplishment as well as education.—“But let us see how he rides and shoots!” he thought.