She was quaintly accustomed, in the first half-hour of reunion, to a sensation of depression, to be chilled, startled into faint, disloyal protest—“But—but this isn’t Justin! I forgot he was like this.” And then she would round indignantly upon herself—“Anyhow I like him this way.” But in a day or two ideal and real would have more or less melted into one again, obstinate discrepancies being explained away by Laura airily enough—“It’s because I’m not grown-up.” Her child’s faith in that panacea was almost as strong as her faith in Justin. Yet that last would be sorely tried upon occasion. Their differences, when they occurred, were catastrophic—very funny to watch. There is the old simile of the Skye and the mastiff: or imagine, if you like, Bottom in the Bower, and Titania nearly frantic with him for not _knowing_ (there’s the trouble—she would not mind nearly so much if it were pure wickedness, done a-purpose) but for not _knowing_ that he had just sat down so heavily upon a spread of cowslips that there is little chance of a single gold-coated pensioner being left alive when he gets up again. Not that it is fair to compare Justin with Bottom. Justin, even in the twenties, was not in the least egregious, only solid. He couldn’t help it, could he, if he hadn’t any faults, or that his kindly tolerance of her tantrums could drive Laura into nothing more or less than a fuming replica of her Gran’papa’s canary? (You never realized how red Laura’s hair was until you saw her in a passion.) But, in those encounters, there was revealed a duality of temperament, a distinction in quality, a difference in their grip of life, in the mere meaning, sometimes, that they attached to the words they used, which made you marvel at the attraction that they undoubtedly had for each other. For if Laura enjoyed living in his pocket, Justin would have been equally disconcerted if, one fine day, he had not found her there, like his loose money, and his handkerchief, and his pencil-case, ready to his hand. Yet, as I say, they sparred. There was a clash of claims occasionally. It was not always easy to reconcile “what Mother used to do” with “Justin says.” There were the birds’ eggs, for instance, cause of the most serious of their differences and the last, before she became a big girl and went away to France to be finished, as Aunt Adela phrased it. Justin, as you know, had the magpie instinct that as pleasantly infantizes the ponderous male as a pink paper cap from a cracker the bald head of an uncle at a Christmas dinner. He collected—as Brackenhurst, wisely refusing to involve itself with the objective case, would explain to its visitor behind a kid glove or a convenient Prayer Book— “Yes—the Cloud pew—the only son. Oh, rolling! Oxford—intellectual, you know——He collects.”