“Let me speak, please, Elfride! My assistant, Mr. Stephen Smith, will leave London by the early train to-morrow morning...MANY THANKS FOR YOUR PROPOSAL TO ACCOMMODATE HIM...YOU MAY PUT EVERY CONFIDENCE IN HIM, and may rely upon his discernment in the matter of church architecture.’ Well, I repeat that Hewby ought to be ashamed of himself for making so much of a poor lad of that sort.” “Professional men in London,” Elfride argued, “don’t know anything about their clerks’ fathers and mothers. They have assistants who come to their offices and shops for years, and hardly even know where they live. What they can do—what profits they can bring the firm—that’s all London men care about. And that is helped in him by his faculty of being uniformly pleasant.” “Uniform pleasantness is rather a defect than a faculty. It shows that a man hasn’t sense enough to know whom to despise.” “It shows that he acts by faith and not by sight, as those you claim succession from directed.” “That’s some more of what he’s been telling you, I suppose! Yes, I was inclined to suspect him, because he didn’t care about sauces of any kind. I always did doubt a man’s being a gentleman if his palate had no acquired tastes. An unedified palate is the irrepressible cloven foot of the upstart. The idea of my bringing out a bottle of my “40 Martinez—only eleven of them left now—to a man who didn’t know it from eighteenpenny! Then the Latin line he gave to my quotation; it was very cut-and-dried, very; or I, who haven’t looked into a classical author for the last eighteen years, shouldn’t have remembered it. Well, Elfride, you had better go to your room; you’ll get over this bit of tomfoolery in time.” “No, no, no, papa,” she moaned. For of all the miseries attaching to miserable love, the worst is the misery of thinking that the passion which is the cause of them all may cease. “Elfride,” said her father with rough friendliness, “I have an excellent scheme on hand, which I cannot tell you of now. A scheme to benefit you and me. It has been thrust upon me for some little time—yes, thrust upon me—but I didn’t dream of its value till this afternoon, when the revelation came. I should be most unwise to refuse to entertain it.” “I don’t like that word,” she returned wearily. “You have lost so much already by schemes. Is it those wretched mines again?” “No; not a mining scheme.” “Railways?”