“I was speaking to a girl the other day—by far the most intelligent one I know in these regions—she was talking to me with perfect unrestraint and frankness about all sorts of things. She told me she could see no beauty whatsoever in the Bible, and that she had never been able to derive an atom of encouragement or assurance from anything in it. If it did not bore, it upset her, and made belief harder. It had become a mere patter to her by vile reading and intonation, and the remarkable turns of thought given to it by many minds insulted her reason. Even the poetry of the diction had been spoilt for her and seemed, she said, to reek of half-fledged curates.—Under some conditions this experiment of the Warings might prove a success.” “Oh, but with that mother!” “Ah, yes, that alters the whole aspect of affairs! If you could only have heard the passionless, analytical style in which Waring and his wife discussed the matter and speculated on the issue, which they think will be more typical in Gwen than in Dacre, his brute strength being, in their opinion, his strong point, and his theological side hardly worth considering. They throw it in, however, ‘careless like’ as, if the experiment is to be tried, it is just as easy to try it on two as on one.” “Mercy on us,” again said Mrs. Fellowes, clattering the fire-irons viciously. “By the way, Waring amused me intensely by one revelation he made, he could hardly get it out, and I saw him fling a pathetically-deprecating glance at his wife and give her hand a squeeze before he began. He felt he had to account for the luckless Dacre’s strength of legs, of which he seems to have as poor an opinion as the Psalmist, he feared I might fall into the error of casting the blame on him or his wife, so he determined I should know the real cause. ‘You will hardly believe me,’ he observed, ‘when I tell you that my wife with her refined intellectuality is the outcome of long generations of soldiers and of—ahem,—famous duellists, and I fear our son, Dacre, is a very clearly-defined specimen of throwing-back.’ Poor Mrs. Waring! she felt her ancestry keenly and got as red as a rose during the confession.” “Goodness gracious me! What a woman! what a pair! What in the name of goodness brought the two together and made them marry each other and produce children. If I were Providence and had that on my mind, I’d never look up again.” “My dear child!” “John, in the present state of my feelings, brought on by you yourself recollect, you must forget your sacerdotal character and only remember my state of original sin. Why should two beautiful children’s lives be spoilt for the vagaries of a pair who never had any right to bear children? Think of Gwen’s sad old face full of the trouble of all ages, think of her naughtiness with that horrible unique sort of infernal touch about it; that painting herself blue is the most childish escapade I remember.