"It is precisely those contrarieties which make your sex so charming. You are so full of surprises. No woman, it seems to me, can ever be altogether commonplace." "Oh, I grant you that we are full of surprises," said Olive. "A man, for instance, has only one or two ways of showing his temper, whereas we have fifty ways, all different from each other: which prevents monotony. If we cannot startle you with a wise or a witty remark, we prefer to try an inane one, rather than not startle you at all. We are melodramatic to the backbone, and are always studying a climax or a surprise, if it be only in the petty details of everyday life." "I feel that I ought to say something pretty here, in deprecation of the severity of your judgment," said Jack, with a smile, "but nothing worthy of the occasion occurs to me at present. I fear that I am even more stupid than usual this morning." "Stupidity is certainly the great failing of your sex," said Olive, with candour. "How seldom one meets with a man who has anything to say worth listening to; or if he has, how rarely he knows how to say it. No; in comparison of your sex as against ours, it seems to me that there is only one point wherein we fail--only one grand faculty that men possess and that we have no idea of." "And that is----?" "The faculty of silence. The want of that, and of that alone, has lost us the supremacy of the world." Jack laughed, and Olive went on with her examination of the books. It had been a debatable point with Lady Dudgeon whether or not she should take her children to London with her; but Sophy's earnest pleading not to be left behind had at last won a half-reluctant consent from her ladyship. But there was another reason, of which Sophy knew nothing, why the young ladies should accompany their mamma. The truth was that her ladyship found Miss Deane's services so useful to her in many ways, that she could by no means make up her mind to let Olive stay behind at Stammars. By so doing she would have to take on herself again a number of duties of which Miss Deane had of late relieved her; and how would it be possible for her to do that, with all the extra demands on her time which a residence in town necessarily implied? If Miss Deane had been useful to her in the country, in London she would be invaluable: so to London Olive and the young ladies were transferred in due course.