He smiles slightly, yet very ruefully withal. "My darling!" he says, looking wistfully at her noble head and delicate, thoroughbred face, "you are a great deal too pretty to sell hot potatoes, or matches either; bread-winners should not have faces like yours!" "That is bad reasoning," she answers, trying to laugh; "if I am pretty, people will be more likely to buy my wares. Oh, Heavens!" she cries, throwing up her eyes to the dark wrack driving over head, "what business have people to bring children into the world only to starve, or to sponge upon others? There ought to be an Act of Parliament against it! Oh, why--why is not one allowed to have a look into life before one is born--to have one's choice whether one will come into it at all or no? But, if one had, who _would_ come?--who would?" "I would," answers Bob, stoutly. "I don't think the world is half a bad place, though it is the fashion to abuse it now-a-days, and though it does do one some curiously dirty turns now and then. But after all," he adds, very gravely, "bad or good no one can accuse it of lasting long, and there's a better at the other end of it." "Or a worse," says Esther, gloomily. "Who knows? One cannot fancy the world without one, can one?" she continues, following out her own ideas. "One knows that, not long ago, there _was_, and not long hence there _will be_, no _I_; but one cannot realize it!" "Why should one bother one's head trying?" says Bob, with philosophy. "The leaves seem to come out in the spring," she continues musingly, without heeding him, "the winds to blow, and the birds to sing, all with some reference to _oneself:_ one cannot understand their all going on when oneself has stopped!" Reflections of this character are not much in Bob's way. Pensive musings upon the caducity of the human race are, generally, rather feminine than masculine. A woman dreams over the shortness of life, while a man crowds it with doings that make it, in effect, long. Brandon turns the conversation back into a more practical channel. "Have you any friends that you have known longer than you have us, Essie?" "None." "Any to whom it would be less irksome to you to lie under an obligation, as you call it?" "None." "Any that you like better, in short?" "None," she answers, with a little impatience, as if, in a way, ashamed of her own destitution. "Good or bad, I have _no_ friends, _none_, and you know it." He looks at her with a sort of shocked amazement. "Good God! what is to become of you, then?" he asks, bluntly. "I don't know." "How are you to live?" "I don't know." "Have you never once thought about it?" "Never. I thought that we," she says, her lips beginning to quiver piteously, and her faithful thoughts, that never wander far from it, straying back to the new bare grave, where one half of that "_we_" lies sleeping--"I thought that we should have lived to be old together: most people live to be old!"