everything she learned there seemed like the ends of long threads that snapped immediately.And now - without the indirect charm of school emulation - Télémaque was mere bran: so were the hard dry questions on Christian doctrine: there was no flavour in them, no strength.Sometimes Maggie thought she could have been contented with absorbing fancies: if she could have had all Scott's novels and all Byron's poems! - then perhaps she might have found happiness enough to dull her sensibility to her actual daily life.And yet...they were hardly what she wanted.She could make dream-worlds of her own - but no dream-world would satisfy her now.She wanted some explanation of this hard, real life: the unhappy-looking father seated at the dull breakfast-table; the childish bewildered mother; the little sordid tasks that filled the hours, or the more oppressive emptiness of weary, joyless leisure; the need of some tender, demonstrative love;the cruel sense that Tom didn't mind what she thought or felt, and that they were no longer playfellows together; the privation of all pleasant things that had come to her more than to others: she wanted some key that would enable her to understand and, in understanding, endure, the heavy weight that had fallen on her young heart.If she had been taught `real learning and wisdom, such as great men knew,' she thought she should have held the secrets of life; if she had only books that she might learn for herself what wise men knew! Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.She knew little of saints and martyrs, and had gathered, as a general result of her teaching, that they were a temporary provision against the spread of Catholicism and had all died at Smithfield.
In one of these meditations, it occurred to her that she had forgotton Tom's school-books, which had been sent home in his trunk.But she found the stock unaccountably shrunk down to the few old ones which had been well thumbed - the Latin Dictionary and Grammar, a Delectus, a torn Eutropius, the well-worn Virgil, Aldrich's Logic, and the exasperating Euclid.Still, Latin, Euclid and Logic would surely be a considerable step in masculine wisdom - in that knowledge which made men contented and even glad to live.
Not that the yearning for effectual wisdom was quite unmixed: a certain mirage would now and then rise on the desert of the future, in which she seemed to see herself honoured for her surprising attainments.And so the poor child, with her soul's hunger and her illusions of self-flattery, began to nibble at this thick-rinded fruit of the tree of knowledge, filling her vacant hours with Latin, geometry, and the forms of the syllogism, and feeling a gleam of triumph now and then that her understanding was quite equal to these peculiarly masculine studies.For a week or two she went on resolutely enough, though with an occasional sinking of heart, as if she had set out toward the Promised Land alone, and found it a thirsty, trackless, uncertain journey.In the severity of her early resolution she would take Aldrich out into the fields, and then look off her book towards the sky where the lark was twinkling or to the reeds and bushes by the river where the water-fowl rustled out on her anxious, awkward flight -with a startled sense that the relation between Aldrich and this living world was extremely remote for her.The discouragement deepened as the days went on, and the eager heart gained faster and faster on the patient mind.Somehow, when she sat at the window with her book, her eyes would fix themselves blankly on the outdoor sunshine: then they would fill with tears, and sometimes, if her mother was not in the room, the studies would all end in sobbing.She rebelled against her lot, she fainted under its loneliness, and fits even of anger and hatred towards her father and mother who were so unlike what she would have them to be - towards Tom, who checked her and met her thought or feeling always by some thwarting difference - would flow out over her affections and conscience like a lava stream and frighten her with the sense that it was not difficult for her to become a demon.Then her brain would be busy with wild romances of a flight from home in search of something less sordid and dreary: - she would go to some great man - Walter Scott, perhaps, and tell him how wretched and how clever she was, and he would surely do something for her.But in the middle of her vision her father would perhaps enter the room for the evening, and, surprised that she sat still, without noticing him, would say complainingly, `Come, am I to fetch my slippers myself?' The voice pierced through Maggie like a sword: there was another sadness besides her own, and she had been thinking of turning her back on it and forsaking it.