"Unusual! That in itself constitutes a charm." "I was going to add, however--disagreeable." "Not that--never that," says Hardinge. "You mean to say you really _like_ Perpetua?" her large soft eyes opening with amazement. "It is a poor word," says he, his tone now very low. "If I dared say that I _adored_ 'Perpetua,' I should be----" "Oh, you laugh at me," interrupts she with a little impatient gesture, "you _know_ how crude, how strange, how----" "I don't, indeed. Why should you malign yourself like that? You--_you--_who are----" He stops short, driven to silence by a look in the girl's eye. "What have _I_ to do with it? I did not christen myself," says she. There is perhaps a suspicion of hauteur in her tone. "I am talking to you about my _name._ You understand that, don't you?"--the hauteur increasing. "Do you know, of late I have often wished I was somebody else, because then I should have had a different one." Hardinge, at this point, valiantly refrains from a threadbare quotation. Perhaps he is too far crushed to be able to remember it. "Still it is charming," says he, somewhat confusedly. "It is absurd," says Perpetua coldly. There is evidently no pity in her. And alas! when we think what _that_ sweet feeling is akin to, on the highest authority, one's hopes for Hardinge fall low. He loses his head a little. "Not so absurd as your guardian's, however," says he, feeling the necessity for saying something without the power to manufacture it. "Mr. Curzon's? What is his name?" asks she, rising out of her lounging position and looking, for the first time, interested. "Thaddeus." Perpetua, after a prolonged stare, laughs a little. "What a name!" says she. "Worse than mine. And yet," still laughing, "it suits him, I think." Hardinge laughs with her. Not _at_ his friend, but _with_ her. It seems clear to him that Perpetua is making gentle fun of her guardian, and though his conscience smites him for encouraging her in her naughtiness, still he cannot refrain. "He is an awfully good old fellow," says he, throwing a sop to his Cerberus. "Is he?" says Perpetua, as if even _more_ amused. She looks up at him, and then down again, and trifles with the fan she has taken back from him, and finally laughs again; something in her laugh this time, however, puzzles him. "You don't like him?" hazards he. "After all, I suppose it is hardly natural that a ward _should_ like her guardian." "Yes? And _why?"_ asks Perpetua, still smiling, still apparently amused. "For one thing, the sense of restraint that belongs to the relations between them. A guardian, you know, would be able to control one in a measure." "Would he?" "Well, I imagine so. It is traditionary. And you?" "I don't know about _other_ people," says Miss Wynter, calmly, "I know only this, that nobody ever yet controlled _me,_ and I don't suppose now that anybody ever will."