'They are so preposterous!' 'Yes, yes, I can laugh,' said he, soberly performing the act: and Mr. Rumford covered the wound his delicate sensations had experienced under an apology for Captain Con, that would redound to the credit of his artfulness were it not notorious our sensations are the creatures and born doctors of art in discovering unguents for healing their bruises. 'O'Donnell has a shrewd head for business. He is sound at heart. There is not a drop of gout in his wine.' The lady laughed again, as we do when we are fairly swung by the tide, and underneath her convulsion she quietly mused on the preference she would give to the simple English citizen for soundness. 'What can they be discussing down there?' Miss Mattock said to Philip, enviously as poor Londoners in November when they receive letters from the sapphire Riviera. 'I will venture to guess at nonsense,' he answered. 'Nothing political, then.' 'That scarcely follows; but a host at his own table may be trusted to shelve politics.' 'I should not object.' 'To controversy?' 'Temperately conducted.' 'One would go a long way to see the exhibition.' 'But why cannot men be temperate in their political arguments?' 'The questions raised are too close about the roots of us.' 'That sounds very pessimist.' 'More duels come from politics than from any other source.' 'I fear it is true. Then women might set you an example.' 'By avoiding it?' 'I think you have been out of England for some time.' 'I have been in America.' 'We are not exactly on the pattern of the Americans.' Philip hinted a bow. He praised the Republican people. 'Yes, but in our own way we are working out our own problems over here,' said she. 'We have infinitely more to contend with: old institutions, monstrous prejudices, and a slower-minded people, I dare say: much slower, I admit. We are not shining to advantage at present. Still, that is not the fault of English women.' 'Are they so spirited?' Spirited was hardly the word Miss Mattock would have chosen to designate the spirit in them. She hummed a second or two, deliberating; it flashed through her during the pause that he had been guilty of irony, and she reddened: and remembering a foregoing strange sensation she reddened more. She had been in her girlhood a martyr to this malady of youth; it had tied her to the stake and enveloped her in flames for no accountable reason, causing her to suffer cruelly and feel humiliated. She knew the pangs of it in public, and in private as well. And she had not conquered it yet. She was angered to find herself such a merely physical victim of the rushing blood: which condition of her senses did not immediately restore her natural colour.