Now the building had always been an offence to me. It was like an incompetent servant, who, in addition to being incapable of earning his wages, is possessed of an enormous appetite. With an old-fashioned heating apparatus the amount of fuel it consumed year by year was appalling; and withal it had more than once played us false, with the result that several precious lives were lost in a winter when we looked to the greenhouse to give us some colour for indoors. With such a list of convictions against it, I was not disposed to be lenient, and the suggestion of the discipline of a Reformatory was coldly received by me. The fact was, that in my position as judge, I resembled too closely the one in Gilbert's _Trial by Jury_ to allow of my being trusted implicitly in cases in which personal attractions are to be put in the scales of even-handed Justice; and with all its burden of guilt that greenhouse bore the reputation of unsightliness. If it had had a single redeeming feature, I might have been susceptible to its influence; but it had none. It had been born commonplace, and old age had not improved it. Leaning against the uttermost boundary wall of the garden, it had been my achievement to hide it by the hedge of briar roses and the colonnade; but it was sometimes only with great difficulty that we could head off visitors from its doors. Heywood heaped on it his concentrated opprobrium by calling it the Crystal Palace; but Dorothy, who had been a student of _Jane Eyre_, had given it the name of “Rochester's Wife,” and we had behaved toward it pretty much as Jane's lover had behaved in his endeavour to set up a younger and more presentable object in the place of his mature demented partner: we had two other glass-houses that we could enter and see entered without misgiving; so that when we stood beside the offending one with the estimate of the cost of its reformation, I, at any rate, was not disposed to leniency. “A case for the Reformatory,” said Dorothy, and in a moment the word brought to my mind the advice of the young lord Hamlet, and I called out,-- “Reform it altogether.” “What do you mean?” she asked; for she sometimes gives me credit for uttering words with a meaning hidden somewhere among the meshes of verbiage. “I have spoken the decision of the Court,” I replied. “'Reform it altogether.'” “At a cost--a waste--of sixty odd pounds?” “I will not try to renew its youth like the eagles,” said I, in the tone of voice of a prophet in the act of seeing a vision. “I shall make a new thing of it, and a thing of beauty into the bargain.” She laughed pretty much as in patriarchal days Sara, laughed at the forecast of an equally unlikely occurrence. After an interval she laughed again, but with no note of derision. “I see it all now-all!” she cried. “You will be the Martin Luther of its Reformation: you will cut the half of it away; but will the Church stand when you have done with it?”