had a penny to pay for it; and of course my mother’s head wouldn’t have been of much use if he hadn’t had a head himself. Well, it was all in the family. Paul was a boy that would learn more from a yellow poster on a wall or a time-table at a railway station than many a young fellow from a year at college. That was his only college, poor lad—picking up what he could. Mother was taken when she was still needed, nearly five years ago. There was an epidemic of typhoid, and of course it must pass me over, the goose of a thing—only that I’d have made a poor feast—and just lay that really grand character on her back. Well, she never again made it ache over her soapsuds, straight and broad as it was. Not having seen her, you wouldn’t believe,” said Rose Muniment in conclusion; “but I just wanted you to understand that our parents had jolly good brains at least to give us.” Hyacinth listened to this eloquence—the clearest statement of anything he had ever heard made by a woman—with the deepest interest, and without being in the least moved to allow for filial exaggeration; inasmuch as his impression of the brother and sister was such as it would have taken a much more marvellous tale to account for. The very way Rose Muniment talked of brains made him feel this; she pronounced the word as if she were distributing prizes for intellectual eminence from off a platform. No doubt the weak inventor and the strong worker had been fine specimens, but that didn’t diminish the merit of their highly original offspring. The girl’s insistence on her mother’s virtues (even now that her age had become more definite to him he thought of her as a girl) touched in his heart a chord that was always ready to throb—the chord of melancholy aimless wonder as to the difference it would have made for his life to have had some rich warm presence like that in it. “Are you very fond of your brother?” he inquired after a little. The eyes of his hostess glittered at him. “If you ever quarrel with him you’ll see whose side I shall take.” “Ah, before that I shall make you like _me_.” “That’s very possible, and you’ll see how I shall fling you over!” “Why then do you object so to his views—his ideas about the way the people are to come up?” “Because I think he’ll get over them.” “Never—never!” cried Hyacinth. “I’ve only known him an hour or two, but I deny that with all my strength.” “Is that the way you’re going to make me like you—contradicting me so?” Miss Muniment asked with familiar archness. “What’s the use, when you tell me I shall be sacrificed? One might as well perish for a lamb as for a sheep.” “I don’t believe you’re a lamb at all. Certainly you’re not if you want all the great people pulled down and the most dreadful scenes enacted.” “Don’t you believe in human equality? Don’t you want anything done for the groaning, toiling millions—those who have been cheated and crushed and bamboozled from the beginning of time?”