"Do you know," said Jean, "I know the time when we would have wept at that if it had ever happened to us. It isn’t a joke," she told the fencing girl. Elsie gave a long, quiet laugh. "If I ever have children," she said, "I hope I may keep them from being silly about a trifle of that sort." "That’s one of the jokes of life though. You won’t have children who need any support in that way. "Won’t I?" asked Elsie with round eyes. "No, they’ll all be quite different. They’ll be giving you points on the simple life, and advising you to dispense with maids altogether," said the fencing girl. "I’m not joking. It’s a fact, you know, that children are awfully unlike their parents. Are you like your mother?" she asked Elsie. "Not a bit," said Elsie laughing. "Don’t study yourself merely in order to know about children. You may just have been a selfish little prig, you know," said the fencing girl cheerily. "Study them by the dozen, be public-spirited about it. Then some day you may be able to understand the soul of a child when you get it all to yourself. You won’t just sit and say in a blank way, ’In my day children were different.’" "Oh," cried Jean. "Now don’t. If there’s anything I hate, it’s when Evelyn begins to preach about children." "Oh, well," said the fencing girl with a shrug, "if Mrs.----, whatever your mother’s name is, had known as much about their little ways as I do, she would never have let you worry about that one maid. We are all wrong with domestic life at present. The one lot stays in too much and loses touch with the world, and the other lot are too busy touching the world to stay in enough. We are putting it right, however," she said amiably. "We are----" She spread her hands in the direction of the company collected. "We are getting up our world at present. After that we may be of some use in it." Elsie looked at her rather admiringly. "My father would love to hear you talk," she said amiably. "Talk," said the fencing girl in a fallen voice, "and I hate the talkers so!" "Nevertheless," said Mabel, "given a friend of ours in for tea--who does the talking?" "Evelyn," said Jean, "and invariably her own subjects too." It seems that this girl was not always fencing. She controlled the collecting of rents and practically managed the domestic matters in three streets of tenements of new buildings recently erected in a working part of London. She was also engaged to be married. "Doesn’t this sort of independent life unsettle you for a quiet one?" she was often asked by her friends.