“And suppose we do?” agreed Joan, her courage rising. “Why should we shun one another, as if we were both of us incapable of decency or self-control? Why must love be always assumed to make us weak and contemptible, as if it were some subtle poison? Why shouldn’t it strengthen and ennoble us?” She must have walked mechanically. Looking up she found herself in her own street. And as she reached her doorway the tears came suddenly.!

Carleton himself never interrupted them. Indeed, one might have thought he was not listening, so engrossed he appeared to be in the pile of letters and telegrams that lay waiting for him on his desk. When they had finished he would ask them questions, still with his attention fixed apparently upon the paper in his hand. Then, looking up for the first time, he would run off curt instructions, much in the tone of a Commander-in-Chief giving orders for an immediate assault; and, finishing abruptly, return to his correspondence. When the last, as it transpired, had closed the door behind him, he swung his chair round and faced her. “To accept,” she answered. “They won’t influence you—the terriers, as you call them. You are too strong. It is you who will sway them. It isn’t as if you were a mere agitator. Take this opportunity of showing them that you can build, plan, organize; that you were meant to be a ruler. You can’t succeed without them, as things are. You’ve got to win them over. Prove to them that they can trust you.”

Ought there not to be a school for reformers, a training college where could be inculcated self-examination, patience, temperance, subordination to duty; with lectures on the fundamental laws, within which all progress must be accomplished, outside which lay confusion and explosions; with lectures on history, showing how improvements had been brought about and how failure had been invited, thus avoiding much waste of reforming zeal; with lectures on the properties and tendencies of human nature, forbidding the attempt to treat it as a sum in rule of three? “And you will come and stay with me,” persisted the little Frenchman, “when this affair is finished”—he made an impatient gesture with his hands. “My wife takes much interest. She will be delighted.” “I should let him,” advised Madge. She grew thoughtful again. “We cranky young women, with our new-fangled, independent ways, I guess we hurt the old folks quite enough as it is.”