She was as firmly convinced as Reynold himself of the vast superiority of men, but these intellectual exercises of theirs upset her dreadfully. If only it had been Mr. Scarlett! He had a light laughing way of holding her uncle at arm's length, avowing himself a Conservative simply as a matter of taste, and fighting for the old fashions which Mr. Hayes denounced, because he wanted something left that he could make verses about. Barbara, as she stood pensively on the rug, recalled one occasion when Adrian Scarlett put forward his plea. He was sitting on the sill of the open window, with the evening sky behind his head, and while he talked he drew down a long, blossomed spray of pale French honeysuckle. "Oh yes, I'm a Conservative," he said; "there are lots of things I want to conserve--all the picturesqueness, old streets, and signs, and manor-houses, old customs, village greens, fairs, thatched cottages, little courtesying maidens, old servants, and men with scythes and flails, instead of your new machines." She remembered how Mr. Hayes had interrupted him with a contemptuous inquiry whether there was not as much poetry to be found on one side as on the other. "Oh yes," he had assented, idly swinging his foot, "as fine on your side no doubt, or finer. You have the Marseillaise style of thing to quicken one's pulses. Yes, and I came across a bit the other day, declaring-- '_Que la Liberté sainte est la seule déesse, Que l'on n'adore que debout._'" The words, uttered in the sudden fulness of his clear, rounded tones, seemed to send a great wave of impulse through the quiet room. Barbara could recall the sharp "Well, then?" with which Mr. Hayes received it. "Ah, but not for me," young Scarlett had answered. "You don't expect me to write that kind of thing? It isn't in me. No, I want to rhyme about some little picture in an old-fashioned setting--Pamela, or Dorothy, or--or Ursula, walking between clipped hedges, or looking at an old sun-dial, or stopping by a basin rimmed with mossy stone to feed the gold fish. Or dreaming--and she must not be a Girton young woman--I couldn't imagine a Girton young woman's dreams!" And so the argument ended in laughter. If only it could have been Adrian Scarlett instead of Reynold Harding in the dining-room that night! Barbara's apprehensions would all have vanished in a moment. But Mr. Scarlett was gone, ("He _might_ have said good-bye," thought Barbara,) and the pleasant time was gone with him. The window was closed and shuttered, and the honeysuckle, a tangle of grey stalks, shivered in the wind outside.