Raymond considered.

“I suppose she would.  I hadn’t thought of her.”

“Believe me, she would succeed to admiration.  For your sake as well as mine, she would produce a little masterpiece.”

“She’d do anything to please you, we all know; but I’ve no right to bother her with details of business.  Of course, if you do it, it is a commission and you would name your honorarium, Uncle Ernest.”

The old man laughed.

“We’ll see—­we’ll see.  Perhaps I should ask too high a price.  But Estelle will not be so grasping.  And as to your right to bother her with the details of business, anything she can do for you is a very great privilege to her.”

“I believe I owe her more than a man can ever pay a woman, already.”

“Most men are insolvent to the other sex.  Woman’s noble tradition is to give more than she gets, and let us off the reckoning, quite well knowing it beyond our feeble powers to cry quits with her.”

Raymond was moved at this challenge, for in the light that Estelle threw upon them, women interested him more to-day than they had for ten years.

“One takes old Arthur’s daughter for granted rather too much,” he said; “we always take good women for granted too much, I suppose.  It’s the other sort who look out we shan’t take them for granted, but at their own valuation.  Estelle—­she’s so many-sided—­difficult, too, in some things.”

“She is,” admitted Ernest.  “And just for this reason.  She always argues on her own basis of perfect ingenuous honesty.  She assumes certain rational foundations for all human relations; and if such bases really existed, then it would be the best possible world, no doubt, and we should all do to our neighbour as we would have him do to us.  But the Golden Rule doesn’t actuate the bulk of mankind, unfortunately.  Men and women are not as good as Estelle thinks them.”

Raymond agreed eagerly.

“You’ve hit it,” he said.  “It is just that.  She’s right in theory every time; and if people were all as straight and altruistic and high-principled as she is, there’d really be no more bother about morals in the world.  Native good sense would decide.  Even as it is, the native good sense of mankind is deciding certain questions and will presently push the lawyers into codifying their mouldy laws, and then give reason a chance to cleanse the whole archaic lump of them; but as it is, Estelle—­Take Marriage, for example.  I agree with her all the way—­in theory.  But when you come to view the situation in practice—­you’re up against things as they are, and you never want people you love to be martyrs, however noble the cause.  Estelle says the law of sex relationships is barbaric, and that marriage is being submitted to increasing rational criticism, which the law and the Church both conspire to ignore.  She thinks that these barriers to progress ought to be swept away, because they have a vicious effect on the institution and degrade men and women.  She’s always got her eye on the future, and the result is sometimes that she doesn’t focus the present too exactly.  It’s noble, but not practical.”