He had had
a good education, and considered himself to be ably equipped. It was
true he had not been to either Oxford or Cambridge, but he had enjoyed
the advantages possessed by a Scotch university even over an English
one, consisting mainly in the freedom of an unhampered development.
Since then he had read largely, and had cultivated naturally wide
sympathies. As his vehicle for utterance, we have already seen that he
had a great attraction to verse, and had long held and argued that the
best training for effective prose was exercise in the fetters of
verse--a conviction in which he had lived long enough to confirm
himself, and perhaps one or two besides.
His relations with his mother, and consequent impediments to seeing
Annie, took away the sting of having to part with her for awhile; and,
when he finally closed with the offer, she at once resumed her
application for a place in the High School, and was soon accepted, for
there were not a few in the town capable of doing justice to her fitness
for the office; so that now she had the joy not merely of being able to
live with her mother as before, and of contributing to her income, but
of knowing at the same time that she lived in a like atmosphere with
Hector, where her growth in the knowledge of literature, and her
experience in the world of thought, would be gradually fitting her for a
companion to him whom she continued to regard as so much above her. Her
marked receptivity in the matter of verse, and her intrinsic
discrimination of nature and character in it, became in her, at length,
as they grew, sustaining forces, enlarging her powers both of sympathy
and judgment, so that soon she came to feel, in reading certain of the
best writers, as if she and Hector were looking over the same book
together, reading and pondering it as one, simultaneously seeing what
the writer meant and felt and would have them see and feel.
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