to be; he felt, besides, that he had spoken with rather more of the ex cathedra tone than was proper.  A young man of opinions generally finds it so much easier to impress people with his tone than with his arguments!  But he consoled himself with the reflection that the average woman—­that word average was a balm for every wound—­that the average woman is always tied to her religion, and intolerant of any doubts.  He was pleased to think that Helen Minorkey was not intolerant.  Of that he felt sure.  He did not carry the analysis any farther, however; he did not ask why Helen was not intolerant, nor ask whether even intolerance may not sometimes be more tolerable than indifference.  And in spite of his unpleasant irritation at finding this “average” woman not overawed by his oracular utterances, nor easily beaten in a controversy, Albert had a respect for her deeper than ever.  There was something in her anger at Westcott that for a moment had seemed finer than anything he had seen in the self-possessed Miss Minorkey.  But then she was so weak as to allow her intellectual conclusions to be influenced by her feelings, and to be intolerant.

I have said that this thing of falling in love is a very complex catastrophe.  I might say that it is also a very uncertain one.  Since we all of us “rub clothes with fate along the street,” who knows whether Charlton would not, by this time, have been in love with Miss Marlay if he had not seen Miss Minorkey in the stage?  If he had not run against her, while madly chasing a grasshopper?  If he had not had a great curiosity about a question in botany which he could only settle in her company?  And even yet, if he had not had collision with Isa on the question of Divine Providence?  And even after that collision I will not be sure that the scale might not have been turned, had it not been that while he was holding this conversation with Isa Marlay, his mother and sister had come into the next room.  For when he went out they showed unmistakable pleasure in their faces, and Mrs. Plausaby even ventured to ask:  “Don’t you like her, Albert?”

And when the mother tried to persuade him to forego his visit to the hotel in the evening, he put this and that together.  And when this and that were put together, they combined to produce a soliloquy: 

“Mother and Katy want to make a match for me.  As if they understood me!  They want me to marry an average woman, of course.  Pshaw!  Isabel Marlay only understands the ‘culinary use’ of things.  My mother knows that she has a ‘knack,’ and thinks it would be nice for me to have a wife with a knack.  But mother can’t judge for me.  I ought to have a wife with ideas.  And I don’t doubt Plausaby has a hand in trying to marry off his ward to somebody that won’t make too much fuss about his accounts.”

And so Charlton was put upon studying all the evening, to find points in which Miss Minorkey’s conversation was superior to Miss Marlay’s.  And judged as he judged it—­as a literary product—­it was not difficult to find an abundant advantage on her side.