"I should love to see her," said Miss Gold. "Every one whom one can trust to do a few little things is so valuable; but it is the large sums that are the hardest nuts to crack. I have so much, you know, and I can spend so little. This house costs practically nothing; I want no clothes; the doctor is almost my heaviest expense, and really I could do without him, because whether he comes or whether he doesn't this thing has got to go on getting worse. That is fixed." My poor Agnes. "I have had the most fantastic ideas," she hurried on. "I'll tell you of one of them. You know Burns's lines about resisting temptation? They're in that green book on the second shelf, there; the fourth from the end. It is Cunningham's edition, and came from your shop. The book-mark is in the place." I found them. "Read them aloud," Miss Gold commanded. I did so-- "Then gently scan your brother Man, Still gentlier sister Woman; Tho' they may gang a kennin' wrang, To step aside is human: One point must still be greatly dark, The moving _Why_ they do it; And just as lamely can ye mark How far perhaps they rue it. Who made the heart, 'tis _He_ alone Decidedly can try us, He knows each chord, its various tone, Each spring, its various bias: Then at the balance let's be mute, We never can adjust it; What's _done_ we partly may compute, But know not what's _resisted_." "Well," she said, "what do you think I did? I wrote to a thousand clergymen, chosen at random from the directory, and asked if I might be allowed to defray the cost of having these lines suitably illuminated in gold in some part of their church. Many did not answer at all; others refused straightforwardly on their own responsibility; many said that they themselves would like to give permission, but their bishops would not approve. One only asked me to do it, and I did it; but I have a notion, from the report of a spy that I sent down, that a hatchment has since been hung over it." "You might," said Trist, "have offered to strike a bargain with them. In place, for example, of the tenth commandment, which was devised for the well-being of an Eastern tribe in camp, and has no bearing whatever at the present day in a civilisation that demands Sunday labour of most kinds, from cooking to shunting, and is broken perhaps most flagrantly by the clergymen who enunciate it at so much a year (yes, and call it work too, holding their poor foreheads as they tell you of their weary life)--you might have offered Burns's lines in place of that. Burns at any rate touches real life, whereas the presence of that law on the walls of the chancel has merely an archæological value." "Yes," said Miss Gold, "but we must not look for logic." "Nor," said Trist, "in a social society like the Church for courage."