“I don’t doubt your cleverness, but the learned professions?”

“A woman has a tongue, you know, and that is their grand requisite.  I interrupted you, Miss Dodd; pray forgive me.”

“Well, then, let us go through them.  To be a clergyman, what is required?  To preach, and visit the sick, and feel for them, and understand what passes in the sorrowful hearts of the afflicted.  Is that beyond our sex?”

“That last is far more beyond a man at most times; and oh, the discourses one has to sit out in church!”

“Portia made a very passable barrister, Miss Dodd.”

“Oh, did she?”

“Why, you know she did; and as for medicine, the great successes there are achieved by honeyed words, with a long word thrown in here and there.  I’ve heard my own mamma say so.  Now which shall I be?”

“I suppose you are making fun of me,” said Eve; “but there is many a true word spoken in jest.  You could be a better, parson, lawyer or doctor than nine out of ten, but they won’t let us.  They know we could beat them into fits at anything but brute strength and wickedness, so they have shut all those doors in us poor girls’ faces.”

“There; you see,” said Lucy archly, “but two lines are open to our honorable ambition, marriage and—­water-colors.  I think marriage the more honorable of the two; above all, it is the more fashionable.  Can you blame me, then, if my ambition chooses the altar and not the easel?”

“So that is what you have been bringing me to.”

“You came of your own accord,” was the sly retort.  “Let me offer you some luncheon.”

“No, thank you; I could not eat a morsel just now.”

Eve went away, her bright little face visibly cast down.  It was not Miss Fountain’s words only, and that new trait of hard satire, which she had so suddenly produced from her secret recesses.  Her very tones were cynical and worldly to Eve’s delicate sense of hearing.

“Poor, poor David!” she thought, and when she got to the door of the room she sighed; and as she went home she said more than once to herself, “No more heart than a marble statue.  Oh, how true our first thought is!  I come back to mine—­”

Lucy (sola). "Then what right had she to come here and try to turn me inside out?”

CHAPTER X.

As the hour of Lucy’s departure drew near, Mr. Fountain became anxious to see her betrothed to his friend, for fear of accidents.  “You had better propose to her in form, or authorize me to do so, before she goes to that Mrs. Bazalgette.”  This time it was Talboys that hung back.  He objected that the time was not opportune.  “I make no advance,” said he; “on the contrary, I seem of late to have lost ground with your niece.”