and I have a talent—yes, father, I know I have a talent—for drawing, and I shall paint well some day; I am determined I will."
Mr. William Shaw saw his niece more frequently than his wife did, and they got on excellently well together. She was too shrewd not to gauge his intellect justly, or to demand from him more than he was capable of producing. But they went together into the farmyard, and he instructed her as to pigs and shorthorns; and he held forth in the stable as to the points of his brother's horses, and he taught her to drive tandem and to play billiards; and their talk together was always of country things. In a way, they were great friends. He became really fond of the girl, who would be the natural heiress to his own as well as his brother's fortune, and whom he had once regarded as a terribly spoilt child. It cannot be said that, even now, she accommodated herself to every one's society as she did to her uncle's. To some of the elders of Whiteburn she seemed "a savage kind of a gurl;" while their sons declared that Anthony Shaw's daughter had no more manners than a cow, and that "it would require every shilling of her money, by-and-by, to make a fellow look at her." It must be confessed that these strictures were not altogether unmerited. Elizabeth's general demeanour towards strangers at this time was not encouraging. Unless she took a fancy to a visitor, or that something which fell from him in conversation with her father interested her, she remained silent, and scarcely answered when spoken to. The feminine desire to please was conspicuously absent in the girl's composition at present, and her father noted it with regret.
