’"Oh, I know nothing about it,” said Isabel Bretherton, divinely unconscious of the little skirmish going on around her.  “You must teach me, Mr. Forbes.  I only know what touches me, what I like—­that’s all I know in anything.”

’"It’s all we any of us know,” said Wallace airily.  “We begin with ’I like’ and ‘I don’t like,’ then we begin to be proud, and make distinctions and find reasons; but the thing beats us, and we come back in the end to ‘I like’ and ‘I don’t like.’”

’The lunch over, we strolled out along the common, through heather which as yet was a mere brown expanse of flowerless undergrowth, and copses which overhead were a canopy of golden oak-leaf, and carpeted underneath with primroses and the young up-curling bracken.  Presently through a little wood we came upon a pond lying wide and blue before us under the breezy May sky, its shores fringed with scented fir-wood and the whole air alive with birds.  We sat down under a pile of logs fresh-cut and fragrant, and talked away vigorously.  It was a little difficult often to keep the conversation on lines which did not exclude Miss Bretherton.  Forbes, the Stuarts, Wallace, and I are accustomed to be together, and one never realises what a freemasonry the intercourse even of a capital is until one tries to introduce an outsider into it.  We talked the theatre, of course, the ways of different actors, the fortunes of managers.  Isabel Bretherton naturally has as yet seen very little; her comments were mainly personal, and all of a friendly, enthusiastic kind, for the profession has been very cordial to her.  A month or five weeks more and her engagement at the Calliope will be over.  There are other theatres open to her, of course, and all the managers are at her feet; but she has set her heart upon going abroad for some time, and has, I imagine, made so much money this season that the family cannot in decency object to her having her own way.  “I am wild to get to Italy,” she said to me in her emphatic, impetuous way.  “Sir Walter Rutherford has talked to me so much about it that I am beginning to dream of it.  I long to have done with London and be off!  This English sun seems to me so chilly,” and she drew her winter cloak about her with a little shiver, although the day was really an English summer day, and Mrs. Stuart was in cotton.  “I come from such warmth, and I loved it.  I have been making acquaintance with all sorts of horrors since I came to London—­face-ache and rheumatism and colds!—­I scarcely knew there were such things in the world.  And I never knew what it was to be tired before.  Sometimes I can hardly drag through my work.  I hate it so:  it makes me cross like a naughty child!”

’"Do you know,” I said, flinging myself down beside her on the grass and looking up at her, “that it’s altogether wrong?  Nature never meant you to feel tired; it’s monstrous, it’s against the natural order of things!”