"Not now, Mother, please; we must talk of Glasgow now. I want to finish your _Life_ this week and get begun to my Christmas presents. You'll read the letters to us when Marget and Mysie come in to prayers.... I wish you would give me your advice, for, after all, it is your affair. So far I have drawn your portrait as a very efficient, very painstaking, and, I fear, very dull minister's wife. You see, that side of you is so easy to draw. But the other side is so much more _you_. If I could only write about you as I remember you at home with us, anxiously doing your best for every one, slaving away with Sales of Work and Mothers' Meetings, incorrigibly hospitable, pretending deep and abiding pessimism, but liable at any moment to break into bursts of delightful nonsense and rash talking--the person who never talks rashly is a weariness to the flesh--a most excellent mimic--when you came in from visiting, you made us see the people you had been seeing--with a rare talent for living..." Mrs. Douglas laid down her stocking and gasped at her daughter: "_Ann_! I don't know what you mean. There never was a more ordinary woman, and if you try to make me anything else, you are simply romancing. I'm sure you have always said that you would know me for a minister's wife a mile away." "In appearance, my dear lady, you are a typical minister's wife, but your conversation is often a pleasing surprise. And, oh! surely, Mother, all ministers' wives don't behave to congregations as you did. _Given to hospitality_ should be your epitaph. I remember when we left Glasgow, Mrs. Nicol, bemoaning to me your going away, said, 'Well, we'll never get another like her. Who else would have bothered to have me and my wild boys in her house?' and I, remembering John and Mackenzie, could have echoed, '_Who, indeed?_'" Mrs. Douglas was about to speak, but Ann hurried on: "No, Mother, don't defend them. You can't have forgotten that black day when the Nicol family arrived to spend the afternoon--John and Mackenzie, ripe for any wickedness. The house had just been spring cleaned, and was spotless, and those two boys went through it like an army with banners. It was wet, and they couldn't go out to the garden, and they scoffed at the very idea of looking at picture-books. They slid down the banisters, they tobogganed down the white enamelled stairs, they kicked the paint off the doors. They broke Davie's cherished air-gun, and their mother, instead of rebuking them, seemed to admire their high spirits. Utterly worn out, I left them to work their wicked will in the box-room--I thought they would be comparatively harmless there; but presently we smelt burning, and found them in your bedroom with the towel-horse on fire. No man knows how they accomplished it, for a towel-horse isn't a particularly inflammable thing, but if I hadn't managed to throw it out of the window, I believe the house might have been burned down."