She raised herself, putting her hands upon his shoulders so that her face was very close to his. “What has become of Him, Dad?” she said. She spoke in a cold voice, as one does of a false friend. “This young man of yours,” he asked, “what is he like?”!

“Doesn’t agree with you?” inquired Miss Ensor. “I asked her once,” said the girl, “why she wasted so much work on them. They were mostly only for poor people. ‘One never knows, dearie,’ she answered, with that childish smile of hers. ‘It may be for a little Christ.’”

“Well, he talked more amusingly than he wrote,” explained Joan. “Get Boswell’s Life of him. Or I’ll lend you mine,” she added, “if you’ll be careful of it. You’ll find all the passages marked that are best worth remembering. At least, I think so.” It would be rather pleasant. There was a little place at Meudon, she remembered. The plane trees would just be in full leaf. “That shows how far it has gone,” she told him, “that you don’t even know it. You pretend to be a philosopher. But you’re really a man.”