“Well, I am sure it’s natural he should feel badly,” said Miss Pynsent, folding up her work with the same desperate quickness that had animated her throughout the evening. “I haven’t the least objection to his feeling badly; that’s not the worst thing in the world! If a few more people felt badly, in this sodden, stolid, stupid race of ours, the world would wake up to an idea or two, and we should see the beginning of the dance. It’s the dull acceptance, the absence of reflection, the impenetrable density.” Here Mr Vetch stopped short; his hostess stood before him with eyes of entreaty, with clasped hands. “Now, Anastasius Vetch, don’t go off into them dreadful wild theories!” she cried, always ungrammatical when she was strongly moved. “You always fly away over the house-tops. I thought you liked him better—the dear little unfortunate.” Anastasius Vetch had pocketed his pipe; he put on his hat with the freedom of old acquaintance and of Lomax Place, and took up his small coffin-like fiddle-case. “My good Pinnie, I don’t think you understand a word I say. It’s no use talking—do as you like!” “Well, I must say I don’t think it was worth your coming in at midnight only to tell me that. I don’t like anything—I hate the whole dreadful business!” He bent over, in his short plumpness, to kiss her hand, as he had seen people do on the stage. “My dear friend, we have different ideas, and I never shall succeed in driving mine into your head. It’s because I _am_ fond of him, poor little devil; but you will never understand that. I want him to know everything, and especially the worst—the worst, as I have said. If I were in his position, I shouldn’t thank you for trying to make a fool of me!” “A fool of you? as if I thought of anything but his ’appiness!” Amanda Pynsent exclaimed. She stood looking at him, but following her own reflections; she had given up the attempt to enter into his whims. She remembered, what she had noticed before, in other occurrences, that his reasons were always more extraordinary than his behaviour itself; if you only considered his life you wouldn’t have thought him so fanciful. “Very likely I think too much of that,” she added. “She wants him and cries for him: that’s what keeps coming back to me.” She took up her lamp to light Mr Vetch to the door (for the dim luminary in the passage had long since been extinguished), and before he left the house he turned, suddenly, stopping short, and said, his composed face taking a strange expression from the quizzical glimmer of his little round eyes— “What does it matter after all, and why do you worry? What difference can it make what happens—on either side—to such low people?” III