She was always, in secret, fantastically ambitious, but her R.A. was one cobweb with her Helen of Troyship (you should have seen Laura going straight to headquarters—Olympus—and talking out the whole wretched business with Zeus) or with the regency she undertook after delivering up Elizabeth (in chains) to Mary Queen of Scots, reinstated and regal and happily converted to Protestantism entirely through Laura’s indefatigable personal exertions. For Laura, to Aunt Adela’s edified relief, was whole-heartedly Anglican, in spite of having to learn collects. She did not explain, if she knew it, that church was a perpetual joy because it had three stained-glass windows with crimson figures, black crimson like the darkest carnations in the big border, or Gran’papa’s port, a crimson to make a small girl squirm with inexplicable pleasure: And because she could sit there and plan out the frescoes she would one day, when she was grown-up and an R.A., paint all over the white-washed walls and up into the barred ceiling, being conveyed thither nightly by the Archangel Raphael, who used to paint pictures too, in Rome, before he was made a seraph, and so would naturally be interested. The congregation, of course, were to be kept in ignorance of the artist and a weekly increasing amazement until it was finished. All but Justin. She would simply have to tell Justin.... That characteristic thought would be realized in characteristic fashion. She was always dying to talk to him, and there was never any time; for Justin even when not enclouded in a silence that might not be broken, a silence which always made Laura, quite unnecessarily, feel rebuked, must still be considered, at any rate in his twenties, to have enjoyed life most in monologue. So Laura, obedient to the latest addition to her Codex Justinianus, “Never worry him to talk,” evolved a system of imaginary conversations which more or less satisfied her. She invented a Justin of her own, a Justin identical in speech and manner and appearance, a Justin who accompanied her wherever she went, into whose sympathetic ear she poured, with a sort of passionate vivacity, every thought and wish and fear and marvel of her developing mind. It was curious to catch her unawares, to see her trotting down a garden path, obviously absorbed in a discussion that required nods and laughter and expressive hands, and little quick, questioning, upward glances, while she endeavoured in vain to keep step with the long stride of an Invisible. Intercourse with this Invisible who to Laura was one with—was, indeed, the real Justin, was so satisfying that when he arrived in the flesh for his holidays, she was able to be satisfactory in her turn, to exist demurely as no more than a domestic pet, with a trick of loosening his tongue for him and the still more stimulating habit of listening in intelligent admiration while it wagged.