"But, Mona, your life has been so free from restriction and pressure. You have been able to develop on the lines you chose." "Don't argue that my responsibility is the greater! How do we know that it is not the less? Besides, there may be very real pressure and restriction, which is invisible even to the most sympathetic eye." "I don't want to argue at all. I don't profess to follow all your flights; but I am perfectly satisfied that you will come back to the point you started from." Mona rose and took down a plaid from the rack. "Make it a spiral, Doris, if you conscientiously can," she said gravely. "I don't like moving in a circle. 'Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul!'" Doris looked admiringly at her friend. She could very conscientiously have "made it a spiral," but she was not in the habit of talking in metaphors as Mona was. The conversation dropped, and they sat for a long time listening to the rattle and roar of the train. Mona did not like it. Somehow it forced her to remember that there was no necessary connection between Lucy's condition and the bright October weather.' "A penny for your thoughts, Doris," she cried. Doris's large grey eyes were sparkling. "I was wondering," she said, "whether that delicious seal is still at the Zoo. Do you know?" "I don't; you might as well ask me whether Carolus Rex is still brandishing his own death-warrant at Madame Tussaud's." "Picture mentioning the two places on the same day!" "I do it because they lie side by side in the fairy memory palace of childhood. Neither has any existence for me apart from that." "And you a student of natural history! I should have thought that most of your spare time would have been spent at the Zoological Gardens." "_Ars longa!_--but you are perfectly right. The Huxley of the next generation, instead of directing us to scalpel and dissecting-board, will tell us to forego the use of those, till we have studied the build and movements and habits of the animals in life. I quite agree with you that it is far better to know and love the creatures as you do, than to investigate personally the principal variations of the ground-plan of the vascular system, as I do." "I don't see why we should not combine the two." "Truly; but something else would have to go to the wall; Turner, perhaps, or Browning, or Wagner. 'We have not wings, we cannot soar; But we have feet to scale and climb.'" "I don't know. Some of us appear to have discovered a pretty fair substitute for wings. But you know I am looking forward to your dissecting-room far more even than to the Zoological Gardens." "You don't really mean to see the dissecting-room?" "Of course I do. Why not?" "Chiefly, I suppose, because you never can see it. No outsider can form any conception of what the dissecting-room really is. You would only be horrified at the ghastliness of it,--shocked that young girls can laugh over such work."