"And nasty," her uncle added. He was not impressed with the wisdom of this scheme; indeed he did not seriously contemplate it as possible. "You are talking nonsense," he said; "absurd, childish nonsense; you don't know anything about it; you have no idea what life in a cottage means; the drudgery of cooking and scrubbing and so on; the doing without society and the things you are used to; as for pigs and gardening, why, you don't know how to dig a hole or grow a cabbage!" But he was not quite right; Julia had learnt something about drudgery in Holland, something about growing things, at least in theory, and so much about doing without the society to which she was used at home that she had absolutely no desire for it left. She made as much of this plan to Mr. Ponsonby as was possible and desirable; enough, at all events, to convince him that she had thought out her plan in every detail and was very bent on it. "I suppose the utter selfishness of this idea of yours has not struck you," he said at last. "You may think you would like this kind of life, though you wouldn't if you tried it, but how about your mother?" "She won't like it," Julia admitted; "but then, on the other hand, there is father. I suppose you know he has taken to drink lately and at all times gambled as much as he could. What do you think would become of him in a boarding-house in some fashionable place, with nothing to do, and any amount of opportunity?" Mr. Ponsonby did not feel able or willing to discuss the Captain's delinquencies with his daughter; his only answer was, "What will become of your mother keeping pigs and poultry and living in an isolated cottage? It would be social extinction for her." "The boarding-house would be moral extinction for father." Mr. Ponsonby grew impatient. "I suppose you think," he said irritably, "that you have reduced it to this--the sacrifice of one parent or the other. You have no business to think about such things; but if you had, to which do you owe the most duty? Who has done the most for you?" "Well," Julia answered slowly, "I'm not sure I am considering duty only; people who don't pay their debts are not always great at duty, you know. Perhaps it is really inclination with me. Father is fonder of me than mother is; I have never been much of a social success. Mother did not find me such good material to work upon, so naturally she rather dropped me for the ones who were good material. I admire mother the more, but I am sorrier for father, because he can't take care of himself, and has no consolation left; it serves him right, of course, but it must be very uncomfortable all the same. Do you see?" "No, I don't," her uncle answered shortly; "I am old-fashioned enough to think sons and daughters ought to do their duty to their parents, not analyse them in this way." He forgot that he had in a measure invited this analysis, and Julia did not remind him, although no doubt she was aware of it.