“Of course they’re absurd, Rachel; of course they say things just because other people say them, but even so, what a nice woman Miss Allan is; you can’t deny that; and Mrs. Thornbury too; she’s got too many children I grant you, but if half-a-dozen of them had gone to the bad instead of rising infallibly to the tops of their trees—­hasn’t she a kind of beauty—­of elemental simplicity as Flushing would say?  Isn’t she rather like a large old tree murmuring in the moonlight, or a river going on and on and on?  By the way, Ralph’s been made governor of the Carroway Islands—­the youngest governor in the service; very good, isn’t it?”

But Rachel was at present unable to conceive that the vast majority of the affairs of the world went on unconnected by a single thread with her own destiny.

“I won’t have eleven children,” she asserted; “I won’t have the eyes of an old woman.  She looks at one up and down, up and down, as if one were a horse.”

“We must have a son and we must have a daughter,” said Terence, putting down the letters, “because, let alone the inestimable advantage of being our children, they’d be so well brought up.”  They went on to sketch an outline of the ideal education—­how their daughter should be required from infancy to gaze at a large square of cardboard painted blue, to suggest thoughts of infinity, for women were grown too practical; and their son—­he should be taught to laugh at great men, that is, at distinguished successful men, at men who wore ribands and rose to the tops of their trees.  He should in no way resemble (Rachel added) St. John Hirst.

At this Terence professed the greatest admiration for St. John Hirst.  Dwelling upon his good qualities he became seriously convinced of them; he had a mind like a torpedo, he declared, aimed at falsehood.  Where should we all be without him and his like?  Choked in weeds; Christians, bigots,—­why, Rachel herself, would be a slave with a fan to sing songs to men when they felt drowsy.

“But you’ll never see it!” he exclaimed; “because with all your virtues you don’t, and you never will, care with every fibre of your being for the pursuit of truth!  You’ve no respect for facts, Rachel; you’re essentially feminine.”  She did not trouble to deny it, nor did she think good to produce the one unanswerable argument against the merits which Terence admired.  St. John Hirst said that she was in love with him; she would never forgive that; but the argument was not one to appeal to a man.

“But I like him,” she said, and she thought to herself that she also pitied him, as one pities those unfortunate people who are outside the warm mysterious globe full of changes and miracles in which we ourselves move about; she thought that it must be very dull to be St. John Hirst.

She summed up what she felt about him by saying that she would not kiss him supposing he wished it, which was not likely.

As if some apology were due to Hirst for the kiss which she then bestowed upon him, Terence protested: