"How _can_ she help herself?" cries Esther's champion, indignantly. "What sort of work are those little weak hands, that little inexperienced head, fitted for?" "Women with hands as weak and heads as inexperienced have toiled for their daily bread before now, I suppose," rejoins Mrs. Brandon, with a certain hardness, foreign to her nature, and arising from that spirit of contradiction, innate in us all, which makes us look coldly upon any object that some one else is making a fuss over. Bob springs to his feet in great wrath, and speaks low and quick: "Mother! I'm sorry I ever broached this subject to you; one takes a long time, I see, to get acquainted with one's nearest relatives' characters. If you can see the child of one of your oldest friends working her poor little fingers to the bone for the bare necessaries of life without stretching out a finger to help her, _I_ cannot!" Speaking thus disrespectfully, he walks towards the door. "A spaniel, a woman, and a walnut tree, The more you beat 'em, the better they be." says the rude old saw. Every woman, from a mother to a mistress, enjoys, rather than otherwise, being bullied. The old woman half rises, and stretching out her hand to her son, says, "My boy! come back! let us talk rationally: don't quarrel with your old mother about a person that will never be so good a friend to you as she is." He turns, half hesitating: anger's red ensign still aflame on his honest face. "Shall I tell you, Bob, why I cannot feel common compassion for--for this girl?" "Why?" "Because," says the old lady, with emotion, Mr. Brandon's image heaving up and down rather quicklier than usual upon her ample breast,--"because some instinct tells me that she has not had common compassion upon you." "'An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth;' in fact," answers Bob, with a sarcasm unusual to him, "you are forgetting, mother, how often you have impressed upon me that we are no longer under the Mosaic dispensation! But why should she have compassion on me, may I ask? In what way do I stand in need for it? _I_'m not a woman, thank God!" She looks at him, intently, with a steadiness that disconcerts him. "Bob, can you look me in the face and tell me that you have not been unhappier since you knew Esther Craven than ever you were before in all your life?" "I have," he answers, simply, "and happier too; so that makes it square." Foiled in this direction, she varies her point of attack a little: "Can you look me in the face, and tell me that since your engagement she has behaved to you as a modest, honourable woman should behave to the man she has promised to marry?" He casts his eyes down troubled, and begins to fidget with a dilapidated little Chelsea Cupid on the mantelshelf, too truthful to say "Yes," too generous to say "No."