Thereafter followed a long conversation, the substance of which has already been given. Its effect was to try Mrs. Euphemia's faith in her husband--which still existed, mind you!--very severely. Have you ever noticed--but of course you have--that when Inexperience testifies to the sinfulness of the human race _passim_, Average Experience hides her diminished head, and does not venture on whatever there is to be said on behalf of the culprit. A shocking race, no doubt, but scarcely so bad as pure minds paint it! Old single ladies have pure minds, as often as not, and wield them with a fiendish dexterity, polishing off Lancelot and Galahad, Mordred and Arthur himself, all in a breath. Which of us dares to try a fall with a pure-minded person, in defence of his sex, or anyone else's? Miss Priscilla, having a pure mind and getting the bit in her teeth in connexion with her nephew-in-law's shortcomings, bolted, and dragged her niece after her through an imaginary Society compounded of London in the days of the Regency and Rome in the days of Tiberius, with a touch of impending Divine vengeance in the bush, justifying reference to Sodom and Gomorrah. She succeeded in making the young woman thoroughly uncomfortable, and causing the quarrel to assume proportions--which is what things that get bigger are understood to do nowadays--such as it never dreamed of at first. For Mrs. Euphemia's scheme of life allowed for everlasting bickerings, never-ending recriminations, last words _ad libitum_, short tiffs, long tiffs, tempersomeness and proper spirit--all, in fact, that makes life drag in families--but always under chronic conditions that precluded a crisis. If her worthy aunt's suggestion that this incident of Sairah was the merest spark from _ignes suppositos cineri_, and that her husband had never been even as good as he should be--if this indicated a true view of his character, she for one wasn't going to put up with such conduct. Corinthians or no! This _was_ a crisis, only it was one that never would have come about but for Miss Priscilla. So, as we mentioned some time since, Mrs. Euphemia cried herself to sleep, and next day, galled by ill-considered moral precepts about the whole duty of Woman, wrote an infuriated letter to her dear Reginald--not her dearest; she might have any number of dearer Reginalds on draught--stating at a very high figure the amount of penance she would make a necessary condition of reconciliation, and even then it would never be the same thing underlined. She was, however, so completely the slave of a beautiful disposition, that no course was open to her but forgiveness, subject only to a reduction of some ninety-per-cent. at the dictation of a rarely sensitive consciousness of obligation to Duty, which she gave him to understand was her ruling passion. The letter demanded the assimilation of an amount of humble-pie outside practical politics--so Mr. Aiken said to a friend after reading it; the