pensable parts of female education. No doubt servants had grown somewhat more skilful, so that the things were done; but with the skill had come an uppishness that the old-school farmer resented as an innovation, and the finer ways were more costly than the older and plainer manners of his youth.
He could not perhaps have put his ideas into words, but he felt that it was a pity that almost all domestic employments were dropping out of the hands of middle-class women in England, without much widening of employments of other kinds.
So that Jessie Lindsay's early training to do everything with her own hands made her the more agreeable to the Copelands, and gave her confidence that she might be useful to them. All Mr. Copeland said about Millmount, and the rent and tithes and income tax and other taxes, and the rotation of crops, and the payment of his labourers was exceedingly interesting to Jessie. She liked to hear a man not much older than her own father talk on subjects that had often been discussed at Branxholm in her hearing.
Whether she had been interested in Mr. Copeland's talk or not, she would have tried for George's sake to appear as if she was; but it cost her no effort; she liked it and she understood it; and
