"Mr. Mildmay!" Cicely felt her cheeks grow hot, and was glad it was dark so that no one could see. "I am a poor example," she said, with a smile. "I think, if you called it vegetation with me, you would be much more nearly right than when you used that word about your life at Oxford, which must have been full of everything impossible to me. Mine is vegetation; the same things to be done at the same hours every day; the poor little round of spelling and counting, never getting beyond the rudiments. Nobody above the age of twelve, or I might say of four, so much as to talk to. I feel I am living to-night," she added, in a more lively tone, "because Mab has been with me since yesterday. But otherwise--indeed you have made a very strange mistake."
"It is you who are mistaken," said the young rector, warmly. "The rest of us are ghosts; what are we all doing? The good people up there," and he pointed towards the Heath, "myself, almost everybody I know? living for ourselves--living to get what we like for ourselves, to make ourselves comfortable--to improve ourselves, let us say, which is the best perhaps, yet despicable like all the rest. Self-love, self-comfort, self-importance, self-culture, all of them one more miserable, more petty than the other--even self-culture, which in my time I have considered divine."
"And it is, I suppose, isn't it?" said Cicely. "It is what in our humble feminine way is called improving the mind. I have always heard that was one of the best things in existence."
"Do you practise it?" he asked, almost sharply.
"Mr. Mildmay, you must not be hard upon me--how can I? Yes, I should like to be able to pass an examination and get a--what is it called?--_diplôme_, the French say. With that one's chances are so much better," said Cicely, with a sigh; "but I have so little time."
How the young man's heart swelled in the darkness!
"Self-culture," he said, with a half laugh, "must be disinterested, I fear, to be worthy the name. It must have no motive but the advancement of your mind for your own sake. It is the culture of you for you, not for what you may do with it. It is a state, not a profession."
"That is harder upon us still," said Cicely. "Alas! I shall never be rich enough nor have time enough to be disinterested. Good-night, Mr. Mildmay; that is the way to the rectory."