“I’m willing enough,” answered Flossie. “But what about Old Mother Nature? She’s going to be in this, you know.” “Could I, as a child, have known an old clergyman?” she asked him. “At least he wouldn’t have been old then. I dropped into Chelsea Church one evening and heard him preach; and on the way home I passed him again in the street. It seemed to me that I had seen his face before. But not for many years. I meant to write you about it, but forgot.”!

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? “If the world were properly stage-managed, that’s what you ought to be,” he said, “the wife of a Prime Minister. I can see you giving such an excellent performance.”

The speaker ceased. There came a faint sound at which she turned her head; and when she looked again he was gone. “Tell me,” he said. There was a note of fierce exultation in his voice. “I’ll promise never to speak of it again. If I had been a free man, could I have won you?” “Do you know, I shouldn’t worry about them, if I were you,” Joan advised her. “Let him forget them when he’s with you. A man can have too much of a good thing,” she laughed.