It was as the two were coming home from Jeanie’s one summer evening. Jeanie always did her best to show off Archie’s learning, and to let Agnes know that he was becoming a person of importance. And on this particular occasion Archie was feeling specially pleased with himself, the more so that Agnes was very quiet, and he felt that she was quite impressed. He was more than usually voluble, having gained much in the art of conversation in his absence. “I am thinking,” he said, “of those days when I was in such awe of our good meenister. To be sure, Agnes, there is much dignity in the office, but it is not you that need feel abashed by my little learning. ‘_Quod ignotum pro magnifico est._’” He rolled the Latin words off his tongue with a relish. Agnes’s temper had been rising all the evening. She was not slow to notice Archie’s self-complacence and she turned on him. “Speak in plain English, Archie M’Clean. You needn’t try to air your knowledge before me. I abashed by you? Stand in awe of your little pickings of learning? I’ll venture to say that I know more this minute about some things than you do. Can you recite me the play of Hamlet? Can you tell me when King Henry Fifth of England entered France? or who it was that wrote the ‘Faerie Queene’?” Archie looked at her in amazement. “Are ye daft, Agnes? Why should you be knowing all those things?” “I do know them, and many other things of the same kind. There is a man, more modest than you, who has been to a great university, and yet who does not all the time be speaking in Latin, and yet I have no doubt but that he has forgotten more than you will ever know. I will answer your Latin speech with another: ‘_Laus propria sordet_,’ and I hope you like it.” She was as proud in her mouthing of the words as Archie had been. It was Parker who had taught her the saying, “Self-praise defiles,” and she had repeated the Latin rendering till she remembered it, and now flung it at Archie with a scorn which completely crushed him. He had not a word to say for some minutes, and then he remarked meekly, “I didn’t know you knew Latin, Agnes.” “I don’t, but I know that, and it fits the case. I’ve no pleasure in a man who blows his own trumpet.” “Do I do that?” “I should think you would be well aware of it when it is your chief occupation. You bluster around here as if the universe belonged to you, and you are so puffed up with importance that there is no comfort to be had in you. Ah, but you’re sadly changed, Archie, and not for the better.” And Archie’s humiliation was complete. Agnes, having begun to give vent to her feelings, went on. “I used to think you were as nice and modest a lad as ever I knew, but if being a minister means disobeying Paul’s injunction not to be puffed up, then I’ll forswear ministers, though they are the heralds of the gospel.”