“Hideous.” She settled it; then pursued her investigation. “What’s the extraordinary interest that he attaches----?” “To the return of a Tory?” Here the young man _was_ prepared. “Oh, his desire is born of his fear--his terror on behalf of Property, which he sees, somehow, with an intensely Personal, with a quite colossal ‘P.’ He has a great deal of that article, and very little of anything else.” Mrs. Gracedew, accepting provisionally his demonstration, had one of her friendly recalls. “Do you call that nice daughter ‘very little’?” The young man looked quite at a loss. “Is she very big? I really didn’t notice her--and moreover she’s just a part of the Property. He thinks things are going too far.” She sat straight down on a stiff chair; on which, with high distinctness: “Well, they _are_!” He stood before her in the discomposure of her again thus appearing to fail him. “Aren’t you then a lover of justice?” “A passionate one!” She sat there as upright as if she held the scales. “Where’s the justice of your losing this house?” Generous as well as strenuous, all her fairness thrown out by her dark old high-backed seat, she put it to him as from the judicial bench. “To keep Covering, you must carry Gossage!” The odd face he made at it might have betrayed a man dazzled. “As a renegade?” “As a genuine Yule. What business have you to be anything else?” She had already arranged it all. “You must close with Mr. Prodmore--you must stand in the Tory interest.” She hung fire a moment; then as she got up: “If you will, I’ll conduct your canvass!” He stared at the distracting picture. “That puts the temptation high!” But she brushed the mere picture away. “Ah, don’t look at me as if _I_ were the temptation! Look at this sweet old human home, and feel all its gathered memories. Do you want to know what they do to me?” She took the survey herself again, as if to be really sure. “They speak to me for Mr. Prodmore.” He followed with a systematic docility the direction of her eyes, but as if with the result only of its again coming home to him that there was no accounting for what things might do. “Well, there are others than these, you know,” he good-naturedly pleaded--“things for which I’ve spoken, repeatedly and loudly, to others than you.” The very manner of his speaking on such occasions appeared, for that matter, now to come back to him. “One’s ‘human home’ is all very well, but the rest of one’s humanity is better!” She gave, at this, a droll soft wail; she turned impatiently away. “I see you’re disgusted with me, and I’m sorry; but one must take one’s self as circumstances and experience have made one, and it’s not my fault, don’t you know? if they’ve made me a very modern man. I see something else in the world than the beauty of old show-houses and the glory of old show-families. There are thousands of people in England who can show no houses at all, and I don’t feel it utterly shameful to share their poor fate!”