"Ralph, while we are at it," he said, "I want to give you a word of advice. _Verb. sap._, you know. If any man knows you, I am that man. As you were remarking, you have lain on my dissecting-board for twenty years." "I wish you had done me under water. You would have made a neater thing of it." "So I would, old fellow, but you were too big. The difficulty was to get you into my mental laboratory at all." Dudley bowed. "Don't bow. It was well earned. You fished for it uncommon neatly. But you know, Ralph, I am serious now. Let me say it for once--you are awfully fastidious, awfully sensitive, awfully over-cultured. Few women could please you. It matters little whether you marry a good woman or a bad,--I don't know that there is much difference between them myself; the saints and the sinners get jumbled somehow,--but you must marry a woman of the world. Gretchen would be awfully irresistible, I know--for a month; she would not wear. Marry a woman full of surprises, a woman who does not take all her colour from you, a woman who can keep you dangling, as it were." "It sounds restful." Melville laughed. "Restful or not, that's the woman for you, Ralph. You are not equal to an hour at the Pavilion, I suppose? Well, ta-ta." Dudley sat in silence till the echo of his friend's steps on the pavement had died away. Then he rose and tramped up and down the room again. "After all, Miss Simpson is only her cousin," he said. "If I routed about I might find some rather shady cousins myself. But then I don't live with them. If her parents were a decided cut above that, how comes she there? And being there, how can she have escaped contamination? I wonder what Miss Simpson's dinner-table is like? Ugh! Is it as squalid as the shop? And why is the shop so squalid? Does Miss Simpson allow no interference in her domain? And yet I cannot conceive of Miss Maclean being out of place at a duchess's table." He dropped into a chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and spoke aloud almost indignantly in his perplexity. "How can a provincial shop-girl be a woman of the world? And yet, upon my soul! Miss Maclean seems to me to come nearer Melville's description than any woman I ever knew. Alack-a-day! I must be besotted indeed. Oh, damn that examination!" Ralph returned to his books, however, and tried hard to shut out all farther thoughts of Mona that night. CHAPTER XXXIII. CARBOLIC! "Holloa, Jones! going home?" "I am going to lunch; I may be back in the afternoon." "Please yourself, my dear fellow, but if you don't finish that axilla to-day, I shall be under the painful necessity of reflecting the pectorals, and proceeding with the thorax, at 9 A.M. to-morrow." "Oh, I say, Dudley, that is too bad." "I fail to see it. You have had one day too long as it is." "But you know I did cut my finger." "H'm. I have not just the profoundest faith in that cut finger. You know it _did_ happen on the day of the football-match."