’"Wilton’s Panmedicon, or Heal All,” a patent medicine.  He sold the patent and retired.’

Merton shuddered.

‘It would be Pammedicum if it could be anything,’ he thought, ’but it can’t, linguistically speaking.’

‘Invaluable as a subterfuge,’ said Mrs. Nicholson, obviously with an indistinct recollection of the advertisement and of the properties of the drug.

Merton construed the word as ‘febrifuge,’ silently, and asked:  ’Have you taken the young lady much into society:  has she had many opportunities of making a choice?  You are dissatisfied with the choice, I understand, which she has made?’

’I don’t let her see anybody if I can help it.  Fire and powder are better kept apart, and she is powder, a minx!  Only a fisher or two comes to the Perch, that’s the inn at Walton-on-Dove, and they are mostly old gentlemen, pottering with their rods and things.  If a young man comes to the inn, I take care to trapes after her through the nasty damp meadows.’

‘Is the young lady an angler?’

‘She is—­most unwomanly I call it.’

Merton’s idea of the young lady rose many degrees.  ’You said the young lady was “strange from a child, very strange.  Fond of the men.”  Happily for our sex, and for the world, it is not so very strange or unusual to take pity on us.’

‘She has always been queer.’

‘You do not hint at any cerebral disequilibrium?’ asked Merton.

‘Would you mind saying that again?’ asked Mrs. Nicholson.

‘I meant nothing wrong here?’ Merton said, laying his finger on his brow.

‘No, not so bad as that,’ said Mrs. Nicholson; ’but just queer.  Uncommon.  Tells odd stories about—­nonsense.  She is wearing with her dreams.  She reads books on, I don’t know how to call it—­Tipsy-cake, Tipsicakical Search.  Histories, I call it.’

‘Yes, I understand,’ said Merton; ‘Psychical Research.’

‘That’s it, and Hyptonism,’ said Mrs. Nicholson, as many ladies do.

’Ah, Hyptonism, so called from its founder, Hypton, the eminent Anglo-
French chemist; he was burned at Rome, one of the latest victims of the
Inquisition,’ said Merton.

‘I don’t hold with Popery, sir, but it served him right.’

‘That is all the queerness then!’

‘That and general discontentedness.’

‘Girls will be girls,’ said Merton; ‘she wants society.’

‘Want must be her master then,’ said Mrs. Nicholson stolidly.

‘But about the man of her choice, have you anything against him?’

‘No, but nothing for him:  I never even saw him.’

‘Then where did Miss Monypenny make his acquaintance?’

’Well, like a fool, I let her go to pass Christmas with some distant cousins of my own, who should have known better.  They stupidly took her to a dance, at Tutbury, and there she met him:  just that once.’