"Isn't it?" The line on Mona's brow vanished. "You know, Doris, I believe I am a bit of the east coast, I love it so. Heigh-ho! I do think Lucy must be better." "Judging from what you have told me of her. I should think the chances were in favour of her meeting you at the station." Mona laughed. "She is an india-rubber ball--up one moment, down the next; but it has been no laughing matter this time. I told you she got through her examination all right." "Thanks to your coaching, no doubt." "No, no, no! I begin to think Lucy has a better head all round than mine. The fact is, Doris, I have to readjust my views of life somehow, and the only satisfactory basis on which I can build is the conviction that we have all been under a complete misapprehension as to my powers. There is something gloriously restful in the belief that one is nothing great, and is not called upon to do anything particular." Doris smiled with serene liberality. Mona had been in her mind constantly during the last month. "Very well," she said. "As long as you feel like that, go your own way. I am not afraid that the mood will last. In a few months you will be neither to hold nor to bind." "Prophet of evil!" "Nay; prophet of good." "It is all very well for you, in your lovely leisure, realising the ideal of perfect womanhood." "Don't be sarcastic, please. You know how gladly I would exchange my 'lovely leisure' for your freedom to work. But we need not talk of it. My mind is perfectly at rest about you. This is only a reaction--a passing phase." "A great improvement on the restless, hounding desire to inflict one's powers, talents, and virtues--save the mark!--on poor, patient, long-suffering mankind. Oh, Doris, let us take life simply, and work our reformations unconsciously by the way. We don't increase our moral energy by pumping our resolutions up to a giddy height." "I am not to remind you, I suppose, of the old gospel which some of your friends associate with you, that women ought always to have a purpose in life, and not be content to drift." Mona turned a pair of laughing eyes full on her friend. "Remind me of it by all means. Go a stage farther back, if you like, and remind me of my dolls. I am not sensitive on either point. I was saying to some one only the other clay that it takes a great many incompatible utterances to make up a man's _Credo_, even at one moment. Perhaps," she added more slowly, "each of us is, in potentiality, as catholic as God Himself on a small scale; but owing to the restrictions and mutual pressure of human life, most of us can only develop one side at a time--some of us only one in a single 'Karma.'" "You seem," said Doris quietly, "to have found the intellectual life at Borrowness at a surprisingly high level." Mona raised her eyebrows with a quick, unconscious gesture. "There are a few intelligent people," she said rather coldly, "even there."