Whereupon, for a moment snubbed and silent, he felt like one of the crowd. Then it made him slightly vicious. "I didn't know but you meant the people in general--till I remembered that I'm to understand from you that _they're_ wise, only occasionally breaking down." It wasn't really till then, he thought, that she lost patience; and he had had, much more than he meant no doubt, a cross-questioning air. "You'll see for yourself." Of which he was sure enough. He was in fact so ready to take this that she came round to full accommodation, put it frankly that every now and then they broke out--not the silly, oh no, the intensely inquiring. "We've had quite lively discussions, don't you know, about well-known points. They want it all _their_ way, and I know the sort that are going to as soon as I see them. That's one of the things you do--you get to know the sorts. And if it's what you're afraid of--their taking you up," she was further gracious enough to say, "you needn't mind a bit. What _do_ they know, after all, when for us it's our life? I've never moved an inch, because, you see, I shouldn't have been here if I didn't know where I was. No more will _you_ be a year hence--you know what I mean, putting it impossibly--if you don't. I expect you do, in spite of your fancies." And she dropped once more to bed-rock. "There are the facts. Otherwise where would any of us be? That's all you've got to go upon. A person, however cheeky, can't have them _his_ way just because he takes it into his head. There can only be _one_ way, and," she gaily added as she took leave of them, "I'm sure it's quite enough!" III Gedge not only assented eagerly--one way _was_ quite enough if it were the right one--but repeated it, after this conversation, at odd moments, several times over to his wife. "There can only be one way, one way," he continued to remark--though indeed much as if it were a joke; till she asked him how many more he supposed she wanted. He failed to answer this question, but resorted to another repetition. "There are the facts, the facts," which perhaps, however, he kept a little more to himself, sounding it at intervals in different parts of the house. Mrs. Gedge was full of comment on their clever introductress, though not restrictively save in the matter of her speech, "Me and mother," and a general tone--which certainly was not their sort of thing. "I don't know," he said, "perhaps it comes with the place, since speaking in immortal verse doesn't seem to come. It must be, one seems to see, one thing or the other. I daresay that in a few months I shall also be at it--'me and the wife.'" "Why not 'me and the missus' at once?" Mrs. Gedge resentfully inquired. "I don't think," she observed at another time, "that I quite know what's the matter with you."