“I give it up,” said Tommy. “I knew that my uncle was greatly upset by the trial—and I have been thinking that perhaps it has rather unhinged his mind—and that was why he took up with such a scarecrow. But he has apparently been a friend of his for years. It shows you how little we know of our fellow creatures,” he moralised. “If there ever was a chap I thought I knew inside out it was my Uncle Ephraim.” Then pity smote him. “If he’s really off his head, it’s tragic. He was the best and dearest and kindest-hearted fellow in the world.” “Did you ask the man whether your uncle had gone mad?” “Of course I did—in so many words. Man seemed to look on it as an astonishing suggestion. He said my uncle had long disapproved of my taking up painting as a profession, and now had arrived at the conviction that the best thing for me was a commercial career—a commercial career!” So do Thrones and Dominations, I imagine, speak of the mundane avocations of a mere Angel. “If you refuse, you’ll be giving up three hundred a year now and heaven knows how much afterwards,” said Clementina. “And if I accepted I would be giving up my self-respect, my art, my dreams, every thing that makes for Life—Life with the biggest of capital L’s. By George, no! If my uncle won’t listen to reason I’ll not listen to unreason, and there’s an end of it. I’ll pull through somehow.” “Good,” said Clementina, who had remained remarkably silent. “I was waiting to hear you say that. If you had hesitated I should have told you to go home and dine by yourself. A little starvation and struggle and fringe to your trousers will be the making of you. As for your uncle, if he’s crazy he’s crazy, and there’s an end of it, as you say. Let’s talk no more about it. What made you beg to come to dinner this evening?” she asked, with a resumption of her aggressive manner. “The desire of the moth for the star,” he laughed. She responded in her grim way, and bade him amuse himself while she went upstairs to wash her face and hands. Clementina did wash her face, literally, scrubbing it with Old Brown Windsor soap and towelling it vigorously afterwards, thereby accomplishing, as her feminine acquaintances asserted, the ruin of her skin. She rose and went to the foot of the stairs. Tommy’s eye fell on the parrot-tulips in their white comet. “What are you going to do with those gaudy things?” Clementina had forgotten them. The curious impulse of the blood that had led to their purchase had been spent. Tommy’s news had puzzled her and had taken her mind off foolishness. She glanced at them somewhat ashamedly. “Stick them in water, of course,” she replied. “You don’t suppose I’m going to wear them?” “Why not?” cried Tommy, and, snatching out a great gold and crimson bloom, he held it against her black hair and swarthy brow. “By Jove. You look stunning!” Clementina, in a tone of some asperity, told him not to be a fool, and mounted the stairs with unaccountably burning cheeks.