"Aunt Helen says there are all sort of possibilities in Daniella, if she ever gets any sort of a chance."
"She won't get much on a ranch," returned Mary Lee.
Nan's music lessons commenced before the holidays were over. She went three times a week to her Aunt Helen, and, although there were days when instead of wrist movements, five finger exercises, and close legato, she gave more time to playing tunes by ear, on the whole, she was conscientious in her practicing, and it took very few words to fire her ambition or to make her appreciate the necessity of patient striving.
"All musicians must go through just this uninteresting drudgery," her aunt would tell her. "Think, Nan, even Beethoven and Chopin and Wagner had to train their fingers by these exercises and scales, so you must not expect to do less." Then Nan would try her utmost and the next time would show the improvement naturally following diligent, painstaking study. It was fortunate for her that Miss Helen knew how to appeal to her imagination and that she varied her talks, upon the dry details, with little anecdotes of the great masters, and with snatches of their best compositions to illustrate what she was saying, so that Nan, with her knowledge of the rudiments of music, gained also a knowledge of musical history which made her work much more interesting.
At this time Nan and Mary Lee, too, were fired with an ambition to further improve their minds, this following certain talks with their Aunt Helen, and they determined upon a course of reading.
"We'll take Macaulay's History of England," said Mary Lee; "it will be the most useful."
The two girls were on their knees before the old bookcase which held mostly old standard works, and few modern books.
"We must have some maps and dictionaries and things," said Nan, clapping the covers of a volume together to beat out the dust. So with maps and books of reference, they established themselves in a quiet corner upon two or three consecutive Saturdays, but at the end of the third Saturday, they found themselves always starting with a sentence which read: "The king had no standing army." Beyond this, they never seemed able to go, mainly because the book to girls of their age meant simply a very dry record, and they found it more interesting to read some anecdote from one of the books of reference, and to talk about what their aunt had told them of England of the present day. Therefore, at last Macaulay was laid aside, and the only fact they remembered reading from the book was that the king had no standing army.