“Surely, my dear lady, and for this reason: that those are the people with whom society has to count. It hasn’t with you and me.” Miss Pynsent gave a sigh which might have meant either that she was well aware of that or that Mr. Vetch had a terrible way of enlarging a subject, especially when it was already too big for her; and her philosophic visitor went on: “Poor little devil, let him see her, take him straight.” “And if later, when he’s twenty, he says to me that if I hadn’t meddled in it he need never have known, need never have had that shame, pray what am I to say to him then? That’s what I can’t get out of my head.” “You can say to him that a young man who’s sorry for having gone to his mother when, in her last hours, she lay crying for him on a pallet in a penitentiary, deserves more than the sharpest pang he can possibly feel.” And the little fiddler, getting up, went over to the fireplace and shook out the ashes of his pipe. “Well, I’m sure it’s natural he should feel badly,” said Miss Pynsent, folding up her work with the same desperate quickness that had animated her through 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 reflexion, 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, for all his figure, to kiss her hand with the flourish of a troubadour and as he had seen people do on the stage. “My dear friend, we’ve 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’ll never understand that. I want him to know everything, and especially the worst—the very worst, as I’ve said. If I were in his position I shouldn’t thank you for trying to make a fool of me.”