“My dear girl,” said he, smiling a smile which he had provisionally patented since his daughter had made it a practice to consult him on curious points of psychology and diction and deportment. “My dear daughter, I have, as you well know, little time to devote to the study of temperament or poetry or unpractical things of that sort, but I have seen enough in the course of a busy but not wholly unobservant life, to convince me that when a young woman goes so far as to confess that she hates any particular young man, or old man, for that matter--she has gone very far in the direction of saying that she loves that particular man. I don’t say that Josephine----” “She doesn’t. She doesn’t--at least--I don’t believe that she has thought about him one way or another. She was, however, quite polite to him today.” “That’s rather a bad sign, isn’t it? When a girl is polite to a man whom she hates, she makes one feel that his chances with her are reduced. But of one thing you may be sure--yea, of two things you may be certain; the first is that no girl hates a man of whom she has not been thinking a great deal; the second is that no girl hates a man unless she knows that he loves her.” “How curious! How very curious! You are sure--quite sure?” “There are variants,” said the man of science. “But one cannot study the properties of the positive and negative currents of electricity for forty years without learning something of the elementary principles of attraction and repulsion. The air was, I think, strongly charged with electricity when the first woman was born; and that being so, don’t you think you might do worse than ask Winwood and Josephine to join us at The Weir, some of these days?” He was smoothing her hair very gently: the action was prettily paternal but it was also strictly businesslike; for was he not the inventor of that microelectrometer which is so marvellously sensitive that it is capable of measuring the force of the current generated by the stroking of a cat. He had experimented on his daughter years ago. No penalty attached to his doing so, though had he tried his electrometer on the cat he would have laid himself open to a criminal prosecution. She was all unconscious of the escaping ohms; she was puzzling out the hard saying that had come from her father. She was trying to see daylight through the obstructions of his phrases and the obscuration of his logic. She shook her head--for the third time--saying: “I’m in a bit of a mist just now. I should like to think it all out.”