“I do think you might have backed me. Gran’papa’s impossible sometimes. It’s absolute pedantry. And he doesn’t mind who’s there. He says I slur my words! I don’t, do I? As if I could help it, anyhow.” “Adenoids, I expect,” said Justin sympathetically. “You ought to have ’em seen to,” and was surprised that Laura was silent for the next few minutes. Not that he objected. Laura listened so well that he would have described her as a brilliant talker; but when she did talk she was always a little too quick for him. She had had, indeed, to break herself of a tendency to finish his sentences for him; for he never thought ahead, but when a question was asked him, or an aspect presented, he would always pause, in his unhurried fashion, to view the matter from all points of the compass before proceeding on his conversational itinerary, and so was apt to come from a totally unexpected quarter to his impeccable conclusions. Indeed he presented his truisms with such an air of having discovered them all by himself that nine out of ten people thought him original; while the tenth—laughed and loved him. His solemnity, you see, to those discerning ones, was—and would be all his life—so disarmingly the seriousness of the small boy who, on one of his mother’s at-home days, had greeted a clerical stranger encountered on the doorstep with— “How do you do? I’m Justin Cloud. Would you like to see my football?” Then, graciously—“I keep it in the pantry.” And in the pantry Mrs. Cloud at last discovered her rural dean, seated on the housemaid’s-box and fiercely upholding Rugby football to a small and intent, but entirely unconvinced, believer in Association methods. For Justin, then as now, was not easily shaken in his belief. He was the reverse of blatant: indeed, he seldom volunteered an opinion on any subject unasked; but once asked, he was maddeningly sure of himself. Laura always considered him her most liberal education—in self-control; for she never argued with him (and they were both young enough to revel in argument) without yearning in the latter end to shake him. Yet he had an occasional attractive way of suddenly and so sweetly seeing your point of view that you were bewildered into receiving the capitulation with extravagant gratitude and a conscience-stricken sub-conviction that he was probably right after all. But when, after hesitation, you looked up to tell him so, you would usually find that his eye and his attention had wandered past you to the new picture on the wall, or the robins on the lawn. Indeed, you would be lucky if he had not picked up a book. To avert that catastrophe you would, if you were Laura, begin humbly and hastily to talk of something else. So Laura, though the adenoids rankled, was at the end of her five minutes ready for him again with a more attractive subject than herself. She headed him gently towards his birds’ eggs, had him perfectly contented rehearsing old finds and anticipating new ones.