“There’s a good deal you can’t help,” answered Robina. “It isn’t fair to judge them by the ordinary standard.” They drifted towards the kitchen garden—it was the time of strawberries—and the remainder of the talk I lost. I noticed that for some days afterwards Veronica displayed a tendency to shutting herself up in the schoolroom with a copybook, and that lead pencils had a way of disappearing from my desk. One in particular that had suited me I determined if possible to recover. A subtle instinct guided me to Veronica’s sanctum. I found her thoughtfully sucking it. She explained to me that she was writing a little play. “You get things from your father, don’t you?” she enquired of me. “You do,” I admitted; “but you ought not to take them without asking. I am always telling you of it. That pencil is the only one I can write with.” “I didn’t mean the pencil,” explained Veronica. “I was wondering if I had got your literary temper.” It is puzzling, when you come to think of it, this estimate accorded by the general public to the _littérateur_. It stands to reason that the man who writes books, explaining everything and putting everybody right, must be himself an exceptionally clever man; else how could he do it! The thing is pure logic. Yet to listen to Robina and her like you might think we had not sense enough to run ourselves, as the saying is—let alone running the universe. If I would let her, Robina would sit and give me information by the hour. “The ordinary girl . . . ” Robina will begin, with the air of a University Extension Lecturer. It is so exasperating. As if I did not know all there is to be known about girls! Why, it is my business. I point this out to Robina. “Yes, I know,” Robina will answer sweetly. “But I was meaning the real girl.” It would make not the slightest difference were I even quite a high-class literary man—Robina thinks I am: she is a dear child. Were I Shakespeare himself, and could I in consequence say to her: “Methinks, child, the creator of Ophelia and Juliet, and Rosamund and Beatrice, must surely know something about girls,” Robina would still make answer: “Of course, Pa dear. Everybody knows how clever you are. But I was thinking for the moment of real girls.”