"When my dear father was as young as you, Mr. Chillingly, I am sure that he had no more interest in turnips and bulls than you have. I do not doubt that some day you will be as practical as he is in that respect." "Do you think so--sincerely?" Cecilia made no answer. Kenelm repeated the question. "Sincerely, then, I do not know whether you will take interest in precisely the same things that interest my father; but there are other things than turnips and cattle which belong to what you call 'practical life,' and in these you will take interest, as you took in the fortunes of Will Somers and Jessie Wiles." "That was no practical interest. I got nothing by it. But even if that interest were practical,--I mean productive, as cattle and turnip crops are,--a succession of Somerses and Wileses is not to be hoped for. History never repeats itself." "May I answer you, though very humbly?" "Miss Travers, the wisest man that ever existed never was wise enough to know woman; but I think most men ordinarily wise will agree in this, that woman is by no means a humble creature, and that when she says she 'answers very humbly,' she does not mean what she says. Permit me to entreat you to answer very loftily." Cecilia laughed and blushed. The laugh was musical; the blush was--what? Let any man, seated beside a girl like Cecilia at starry twilight, find the right epithet for that blush. I pass it by epithetless. But she answered, firmly though sweetly,-- "Are there not things very practical, and affecting the happiness, not of one or two individuals, but of innumerable thousands, in which a man like Mr. Chillingly cannot fail to feel interest, long before he is my father's age?" "Forgive me: you do not answer; you question. I imitate you, and ask what are those things as applicable to a man like Mr. Chillingly?" Cecilia gathered herself up, as with the desire to express a great deal in short substance, and then said,-- "In the expression of thought, literature; in the conduct of action, politics." Kenelm Chillingly stared, dumfounded. I suppose the greatest enthusiast for woman's rights could not assert more reverentially than he did the cleverness of women; but among the things which the cleverness of woman did not achieve, he had always placed "laconics." "No woman," he was wont to say, "ever invented an axiom or a proverb." "Miss Travers," he said at last, "before we proceed further, vouchsafe to tell me if that very terse reply of yours is spontaneous and original; or whether you have not borrowed it from some book which I have not chanced to read?" Cecilia pondered honestly, and then said, "I don't think it is from any book; but I owe so many of my thoughts to Mrs. Campion, and she lived so much among clever men, that--" "I see it all, and accept your definition, no matter whence it came. You think I might become an author or a politician. Did you ever read an essay by a living author called 'Motive Power'?" "No."