It was sad to note that even when speaking of his favourite sister, Gurth should have felt it necessary to adopt this tone of patronage, but even the stoutest champion of girls cannot but admit that the sense of honour is in them less developed than in boys, and that in moments of irritation they betray a petty spite, of which the more brutal male is incapable. Gurth was conscious that he had faults of his own, but he regarded them leniently as being on an altogether different level from those of his sisters. He was a bit of a slacker, perhaps, but most "men" were slackers, and yet pulled through all right by means of a spurt at the end. His chiefs called him obstinate, but a fellow had to know his own mind if he were to get on in the world, and he jolly well knew that he was right as often as not Masters were awful muffs. On the other hand, he hated gush like poison, and was invariably a hundred times better than his word, whereas Dreda could hold forth as eloquently as a parson, with the tears pouring down her cheeks, and her figure trembling with emotion, and the next day forget the very cause of her emotion! The girl was like a fire of shavings, quickly lighted, quickly extinguished, and probably the greatest punishment which she could have sustained would have been compelled to carry on one of her many philanthropic schemes to a deliberate conclusion. They were all stored up in the family archives--the histories of Dreda's charitable enterprises! The factory girl to whom she was going to write regularly every week, and whose address was lost in a fortnight--the collecting cards beyond number, for which, in the first ardour of possession, subscriptions were extorted from every member of the household, and which were rescued from stray hiding-places at the last possible moment and despatched with odd offerings of twopences and threepences from "A Friend" scribbled in, to fill up the empty spaces. Everyone understood that the "friend" was Dreda herself, and that she might be expected to be correspondingly short in tuck money for some time to come! Never a society did Dreda hear of but she panted to become a member on the spot, and never a society but received her resignation, accompanied by a goodly sum in fines, before six months had run their course.