She was very near to him then, if Joseph had but known; but he did not. The old doubleness between his wife of long ago, and this heir to her place in his regard, had arisen anew within him, and it was still the older god who held the shrine. He felt regretfully tender and considerate to his companion by his side, but the enthusiasm of the morning was wanting.
They spoke little to one another as they travelled along. Rose was pale and had a splitting headache, and Joseph was consideration itself. He forbore to disturb her, assisted her to alight when they arrived at Clam Beach, and expressed a hope that she would be better in the morning, when they parted and she went up-stairs.
The Principal of the Female College of Montpelier sat in her room--office, call it, or study--her seat of authority, absorbed in business. Her table was littered with papers; the waste-paper basket overflowed with them. There was ink before her, a pen in her hand. Her cap sat crooked on her head; her whitened hair was rumpled. The too active cerebration within had no doubt disturbed the external trimness of her dome of thought, as phrenologists used to tell us that it worked ridges and hollows in the bones of the skull. She was deep in thought. Her grey, intellectual features were tightened in the effort, and her eye roved vacantly in space in search of those choice forms which had long made her style the model of literary expression in Montpelier.
She had spent the morning in compounding a syllabus, or a compendium--matters in the manufacture of which she was unrivalled. Now she was considering her address on female self-culture, shortly to be delivered before the Institute of Emancipated Woman, with a list of the hundred books which should form the inseparable companions of every female aspirant to Breadth of View. Her eye wandered to the terrestrial globe at her elbow--a symbol of her learned office, handed down from her predecessors in more simple-minded times; and she reviewed the distinguished literary reputations in remote places and times--the less vulgarly popular or comprehensible, the better for her purpose.
Ha! there was the Nile--Egypt--Manetho! A most respectable name Manetho, and not too much said about him. The only difficulty was, were his works extant? She was not sure, and her encyclopædia was too old an edition to make it worth while looking up. Her eye moved eastward: India? _eureka!_ The Rig Veda,--Max Müller and the 'Asiatic Review'! She had read all about it in Littel's 'Living Age,' the pirate's treasure-house.