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understand how
you can let him live by your side and be so ignorant!" Leonora
herself always struck me as being remarkably well educated. At any
rate, she knew beforehand all that Florence had to tell her.
Perhaps she got it up out of Baedeker before Florence was up in the
morning. I don't mean to say that you would ever have known that
Leonora knew anything, but if Florence started to tell us how
Ludwig the Courageous wanted to have three wives at once—in which
he differed from Henry VIII, who wanted them one after the other,
and this caused a good deal of trouble—if Florence started to tell
us this, Leonora would just nod her head in a way that quite
pleasantly rattled my poor wife.
    She used to exclaim: "Well, if you knew it, why haven't you told
it all already to Captain Ashburnham? I'm sure he finds it
interesting!" And Leonora would look reflectively at her husband
and say: "I have an idea that it might injure his hand—the hand,
you know, used in connection with horses' mouths...." And poor
Ashburnham would blush and mutter and would say: "That's all right.
Don't you bother about me."
    I fancy his wife's irony did quite alarm poor Teddy; because one
evening he asked me seriously in the smoking-room if I thought that
having too much in one's head would really interfere with one's
quickness in polo. It struck him, he said, that brainy Johnnies
generally were rather muffs when they got on to four legs. I
reassured him as best I could. I told him that he wasn't likely to
take in enough to upset his balance. At that time the Captain was
quite evidently enjoying being educated by Florence. She used to do
it about three or four times a week under the approving eyes of
Leonora and myself. It wasn't, you understand, systematic. It came
in bursts. It was Florence clearing up one of the dark places of
the earth, leaving the world a little lighter than she had found
it. She would tell him the story of Hamlet; explain the form of a
symphony, humming the first and second subjects to him, and so on;
she would explain to him the difference between Arminians and
Erastians; or she would give him a short lecture on the early
history of the United States. And it was done in a way well
calculated to arrest a young attention. Did you ever read Mrs
Markham? Well, it was like that... .
    But our excursion to M—— was a much larger, a much more full
dress affair. You see, in the archives of the Schloss in that city
there was a document which Florence thought would finally give her
the chance to educate the whole lot of us together. It really
worried poor Florence that she couldn't, in matters of culture,
ever get the better of Leonora. I don't know what Leonora knew or
what she didn't know, but certainly she was always there whenever
Florence brought out any information. And she gave, somehow, the
impression of really knowing what poor Florence gave the impression
of having only picked up. I can't exactly define it. It was almost
something physical. Have you ever seen a retriever dashing in play
after a greyhound? You see the two running over a green field,
almost side by side, and suddenly the retriever makes a friendly
snap at the other. And the greyhound simply isn't there. You
haven't observed it quicken its speed or strain a limb; but there
it is, just two yards in front of the retriever's outstretched
muzzle. So it was with Florence and Leonora in matters of
culture.
    But on this occasion I knew that something was up. I found
Florence some days before, reading books like Ranke's History of
the Popes, Symonds' Renaissance, Motley's Rise of the Dutch
Republic and Luther's Table Talk.
    I must say that, until the astonishment came, I got nothing but
pleasure out of the little expedition. I like catching the
two-forty; I like the slow, smooth roll of the great big trains—and
they are the best trains in the world! I like being drawn through
the green country and looking at it through the clear glass of the
great windows. Though, of