"They'd lie down and let her walk over them! You know they would--" "If they thought she was going in the right direction." Mrs. Sandworth gave him up, and drifted off into speculation. "I wonder what she could have found in that man to think of! A girl brought up as she's been!" "Perhaps she was only snatching a little sensible talk where she could get it." "But they _didn't_ talk sensibly. Marietta said Lydia tried, one of the times when they were going over it with her, Lydia tried to tell her mother some of the things they said that night when he took her home from here. Marietta said they were 'too sickish!' 'Flat Sunday-school cant about wanting to be good,' and all that sort of thing." "That certainly wouldn't have tempted _Marietta_ from the path of virtue and sharp attention to a good match," murmured the doctor. "Nobody can claim that there's anything very seductive to the average young lady in Rankin's fanaticism." "Oh, you admit he's a fanatic!" Mrs. Sandworth seized on a valuable piece of driftwood which the doctor's tempest had thrown at her feet. "Everybody who's worth his salt is a fanatic." "Not Paul. Everybody says he's so sane and levelheaded." "There isn't a hotter one in creation!" "Than _Paul_?" "Than Paul." "Oh, Marius!" she reproached him for levity. "He's a fanatic for success." "Oh, I don't call _that_--" "Nor nobody else in Endbury--but it is, all the same. And the only wonder is that Lydia should have been attracted by Rankin's heretical brand and not by Paul's orthodox variety. It shows she's rare." "Good gracious, Marius! You talk as though it were a question of ideas or convictions." "That's a horrible conception," he admitted gravely. "It's which one she's in love with!" Mrs. Sandworth emitted this with solemnity. The doctor stood up to go. "She's not in love with either," he pronounced. "She's never been allowed the faintest sniff at reality or life or experience--how can she be in love?" "Well, they're in love with her," she triumphed for her sex. "I don't know anything about Paul's inner workings, and as for Rankin, I don't know whether he's in love with her or not. He's sorry for her--he's touched by her--" Mrs. Sandworth felt the ground slip from beneath her feet. "Good gracious me! If he's not in love with her, nor she with him, what are you making all this fuss about?" The doctor thrust out his lips. "I'm only protesting in my usual feeble, inadequate manner, after the harm's all done, at idiots and egotists laying their dirty hands on a sacred thing--the right of youth to its own life--" "Well, if you call that a feeble protest--!" she called after him. He reappeared, hat in hand. "It's nothing to what I'd like to say. I will add that Daniel Rankin's a man in a million."