“About going there to—­manufacture?”

Mavering nodded.  “He’s given me three weeks to decide whether I would like to do that or go in for law.  That’s what I came up here for.”

There was a little pause.  She bent her head down over the clusters she was grouping.  “Is the light of Campobello particularly good on such questions?” she asked.

“I don’t mean that exactly, but I wish you could help me to some conclusion.”

“Yes; why not?”

“It’s the first time I’ve ever had a business question referred to me.”

 Well, then, you can bring a perfectly fresh mind to it.”

“Let me see,” she said, affecting to consider.  “It’s really a very important matter?”

“It is to me.”

After a moment she looked up at him.  “I should think that you wouldn’t mind living there if your business was there.  I suppose it’s being idle in places that makes them dull.  I thought it was dull in London.  One ought to be glad—­oughtn’t he?—­to live in any place where there’s something to do.”

“Well, that isn’t the way people usually feel,” said Mavering.  “That’s the kind of a place most of them fight shy of.”

Alice laughed with an undercurrent of protest, perhaps because she had seen her parents’ whole life, so far as she knew it, passed in this sort of struggle.  “I mean that I hate my own life because there seems nothing for me to do with it.  I like to have people do something.”

“Do you really?” asked Mavering soberly, as if struck by the novelty of the idea.

“Yes!” she said, with exaltation.  “If I were a man—­”

He burst into a ringing laugh.  “Oh no; don’t!”

“Why?” she demanded, with provisional indignation.

“Because then there wouldn’t be any Miss Pasmer.”

It seemed to Alice that this joking was rather an unwarranted liberty.  Again she could not help joining in his light-heartedness; but she checked herself so abruptly, and put on a look so austere, that he was quelled by it.

“I mean,” he began—­“that is to say—­I mean that I don’t understand why ladies are always saying that.  I am sure they can do what they like, as it is.”

“Do you mean that everything is open to them now?” she asked, disentangling a cluster of the berries from those in her lap, and beginning a fresh bunch.

“Yes,” said Mavering.  “Something like that—­yes.  They can do anything they like.  Lots of them do.”

“Oh yes, I know,” said the girl.  “But people don’t like them to.”

“Why, what would you like to be?” he asked.

She did not answer, but sorted over the clusters in her lap.  “We’ve got enough now, haven’t we?” she said.

“Oh, not half,” he said.  “But if you’re tired you must let me make up some of the bunches.”

“No, no!  I want to do them all myself,” she said, gesturing his offered hands away, with a little nether appeal in her laughing refusal.