Onoria did not shriek her emotional history upon house-tops, and as far as the relations of the sexes were concerned, she was not modern—that is to say she thought there should be no relation except marriage; and even that should be concealed as far as possible. Women she despised. Men sought Onoria to tell her what they felt for other women, they talked politics with her, and they took a monstrous and secret pleasure in hearing her abuse her own sex; but with the exception of Mr. Gubbins they did not propose to share their lives with Onoria; they preferred the weaker sisters whom Onoria had relentlessly dissected for their special delectation. They enjoyed watching this merciless analysis of a suspected sex, but in spite of their suspicions they married the subjects of the analysis. Onoria hated women. It may have been because she had been an only girl in a family of five, and that certain limitations and inhibitions brought home to her early in life the disabilities of her sex without the compensating spiritual advantages which occur later; or it may have been that something in herself warned her that her most marked qualities were not those that succeed in attracting, where qualities less marked and perhaps less worthy of attention prevail. Each of her brothers in turn gave themselves over without reprieve to an incarnate devil. This is not their own account of the transaction; they were under the impression that they had married singularly delightful types of womanhood, but Onoria found these women out, tried them in the furnace of her fraternal love and told them roundly what she thought of them. The result of freedom of speech is often the separation of families. Onoria quarrelled bitterly and irretrievably with each of her sisters-in-law in turn, and never went near any of them again. She referred to her brothers as “poor dear So-and-So”—in the manner of the pious whose dead are in the hands of the Lord. She sometimes saw them in neutral places, and she sent her nephews and nieces handsome presents at Christmas, especially her nephews. When Onoria asserted that her family had been ruined by women, she firmly believed this to be the fact. People who invariably speak the truth are sometimes misled as to the nature of fact; it is so difficult for truthful natures to realise that they are not in possession of the whole of that evasive quality. At the High School Onoria taught nothing but girls. She taught them music and singing with bitterness and with boredom for over twenty years, and she taught them exceedingly well. There is an excellent poem which asserts that “He who only rules by terror does a grievous wrong,” and there is no doubt a good deal to be said for this theory. All Onoria’s pupils would have agreed to it with rapture; still you do not go down the path of least resistance often if you find lions in the way.