"How jolly it was, that summer we used to sketch so much--all four of us together!" And Jack, who was rubbing some new stuff of his own compounding into his fishing-boots, replied: "Awfully. I vote we take to it again when the weather's warmer." But Jack is so sympathetic, he will agree with anything one says. Indeed, I am sure that he feels what one feels--for the time, at any rate. Clement is very different. He always disputes and often snubs what one says; partly, I am sure, from a love of truth--a genuine desire to keep himself and everybody else from talking in an unreal way, and from repeating common ideas without thinking them out at first hand; and partly, too, from what Keziah calls the "contradictiousness" of his temper. He was in the room when Jack and I were talking, but he was not talking with us. He was reading for his examination. All the Arkwrights can work through noise and in company, having considerable powers of mental abstraction. I think they even sometimes combine attention to their own work with an occasional skimming of the topics current in the room as well. Some outlying feeler of Clement's brain caught my remark and Jack's reply. "My dear Margery," said he, "you are at heart one of the most unaffected people I know. Pray be equally genuine with your head, and do not encourage Jack in his slipshod habits of thought and conversation by----" "Slipshod!" interrupted Jack, holding his left arm out at full length before him, the hand of which was shod with a fishing-boot. "Slipshod! They fit as close as your convictions, and would be as stiff and inexorable as logic if I didn't soften them with this newly-invented and about-to-be-patented ointment by the warmth of a cheerful fire and Margery's beaming countenance." Clement had been reading during this sentence. Then he lifted his head, and said pointedly: "What I was going to advise _you_, Margery, is never to get into the habit of adopting sentiments till you are quite sure you really mean them. It is by the painful experience of my own folly that I know what trouble it gives one afterwards. If ever the time comes when you want to know your real opinion on any subject, the process of getting rid of ideas you have adopted without meaning them will not be an easy one." I am not as intellectual as the Arkwrights. I can always see through Jack's jokes, but I am sometimes left far behind when Eleanor or Clement "take flight," as Jack calls it, on serious subjects. I really did not follow Clement on this occasion. With some hesitation I said: "I don't know that I quite understand."