"Are you walking towards home, Mrs Beverley? Perhaps we might go so far together," said the Vicar's wife, as Mrs Gardiner nodded adieu, and entered the grocer's shop, and the two women turned into a side street, composed of those dreary stucco-faced little villas which seem the special abode of insurance agents and dressmakers. The houses continued but a short way, and then gave place to nursery gardens, and scattered habitations of a better type. Grizel hated the mean little houses, not for any sympathy for the inconvenience which they must cause to their inhabitants, but because she herself was bound to pass them on her way to the High Street. She amused herself by planning wholesale fires, in which entire terraces would be devoured, and in a hazy, indefinite fashion had decided that such a catastrophe would be profitable for the insurance agents, as well as for herself. Trying for the dressmakers, of course, but then dressmakers spent their lives in being trying to other people. Let them take their turn! This morning, however, Grizel was oblivious of the villas, she was peering into Mrs Evans's large face, and saying tentatively: "You stopped me... Why shouldn't I say it? If I don't think Miss Mallison _is_ the right girl, why mayn't I--" "These things get repeated. One can't be too careful. I make it a rule to be silent, if I find myself unable to say what is agreeable." "How dull you would be! I say _would_, because it isn't true. You're scolding me now, and I'm sure that's not agreeable! Dear Mrs Evans, do you think it is a suitable engagement?" "Dear Mrs Beverley, how can I judge? Can anyone in the world decide whom a man or a woman will choose?" "They can't, but they can guess pretty well whom they _won't_! You know them both, Captain Peignton and Miss Mallison; can you imagine them living together, and being satisfied all their lives?" The older woman looked at the bride in silence. Hundreds of couples had she seen kneeling hand in hand in the chancel of the church, cheerfully plighting a troth which bound them together till death should them part, and of how many could it be said that they were satisfied! She knew too well into what a prosaic compromise the lives of many of these lovers degenerated, but she would have felt it a sacrilege to say as much to this bride of the happy eyes, and the gay, unclouded heart.