‘Just to name a few of the things for interchange,’ said Weyburn.  ’As to method, we shall be their disciples.  But I look forward to our fellows getting the lead.  No hurry.  Why will they? you ask in petto.  Well, they ’re emulous, and they take a thrashing kindly.  That ’s the way to learn a lesson.  I ’ve seen our fellows beaten and beaten—­never the courage beaten out of them.  In the end, they won and kept the field.  They have a lot to learn—­principally not to be afraid of ideas.  They lose heaps of time before they can feel at home with ideas.  They call themselves practical for having an addiction to the palpable.  It is a pretty wreath they clap on their deficiencies.  Practical dogs are for bones, horses for corn.  I want the practical Englishman to settle his muzzle in a nosebag of ideas.  When he has once got hold of them, he makes good stuff of them.  On the Continent ideas have wings and pay visits.  Here, they’re stay-at-home.  Then I want our fellows to have the habit of speaking from the chest.  They shall return to England with the whoop of the mountains in them and ready to jump out.  They shall have an Achillean roar; and they shall sing by second nature.  Don’t fear:  they’ll give double for anything they take.  I’ve known Italians, to whom an Englishman’s honesty of mind and dealing was one of the dreams of a better humanity they had put in a box.  Frenchmen, too, who, when they came to know us, were astonished at their epithet of perfide, and loved us.’

‘Emile,’ said Aminta.  ’You remember Emile, Selina:  the dear little French boy at Mr. Cuper’s?’

‘Oh, I do,’ Selina responded.

‘He will work with Mr. Weyburn in Switzerland.’

‘Oh, that will be nice!’ the girl exclaimed.

Aminta squeezed Selina’s hand.  A shower of tears clouded her eyes.  She chose to fancy it was because of her envy of the modest, busy, peaceful girl, who envied none.  Conquers also sincerity in the sincerest.  She was vexed with her full breast, and had as little command of her thoughts as of her feelings.

‘Mr. Weyburn has ideas for the education of girls too,’ she said.

‘There’s the task,’ said he.  ’It’s to separate them as little as possible.  All the—­passez-moi le mot—­devilry between the sexes begins at their separation.  They ’re foreigners when they meet; and their alliances are not always binding.  The chief object in life, if happiness be the aim, and the growing better than we are, is to teach men and women how to be one; for, if they ’re not, then each is a morsel for the other to prey on.  Lady Charlotte Eglett’s view is, that the greater number of them on both sides hate one another.’

‘Hate!’ exclaimed Selina; and Aminta said:  ’Is Lady Charlotte Eglett an authority?’

’She has observed, and she thinks.  She has in the abstract the justest of minds:  and that is the curious point about her.  But one may say they are trained at present to be hostile.  Some of them fall in love and strike a truce, and still they are foreigners.  They have not the same standard of honour.  They might have it from an education in common.’