“No, but I thought it might hurt some people’s feelings, and discourage them, if we laugh at the High School.”

“Why, Dolores goes to give lectures there,” exclaimed Valetta.

“Nobody is discouraged by a little good-humoured banter,” said Gillian.  “Nobody with any stuff in them.”

“There must be some training in chaff though,” said Gerald, “or they don’t know how to take it.”

“And in point of fact,” said Dolores, “the upper tradesmen’s daughters come off with greater honours in the High School than do the young gentlewomen.”

“Very wholesome for the young Philistines,” said Gerald.  “The daughters of self-made men may well surpass in energy those settled on their lees.”

Gerald and Dolores were standing with their backs to the wall of Anscombe Church, which Jasper Merrifield and Mysie were zealously photographing, the others helping—-or hindering.

“I thought upper tradesfolk were the essence of Philistines,” returned Dolores.

“The elder generation-—especially if he is the son of the energetic man.  The younger are more open to ideas.”

“The stolid Conservative is the one who has grown up while his father was making his fortune, the third generation used to be the gentleman, now he is the man who is tired of it.”

“Tired of it, aye!” with a sigh.

“Why you are a man with a pedigree!” she returned.

“Pedigrees don’t hinder-—what shall I call it?—-the sense of being fettered.”

“One lives in fetters,” she exclaimed.  “And the better one likes one’s home, the harder it is to shake them off.”

He turned and looked full at her, then exclaimed, “Exactly,” and paused, adding, “I wonder what you want.  Has it a form?”

“Oh yes, I mean to give lectures.  I should like to see the world, and study physical science in every place, then tell the next about it.  I read all I can, and I think I shall get consent to give some elementary lectures at the High School, though Uncle Jasper does not half like it, but I must get some more training to do the thing rightly.  I thought of University College.  Could you get me any information about it?”

“Easily; but you’ll have to conquer the horror of the elders.”

“I know.  They think one must learn atheism and all sorts of things there.”

“You might go in for physical science at Oxford or Cambridge.”

“I expect that is all my father would allow.  In spite of the colonies, he has all the old notions about women, and would do nothing Aunt Lily really protested against.”

“You are lucky to have a definite plan and notion to work for.  Now fate was so unkind as to make me a country squire, and not only that, but one bound down, like Gulliver among the Liliputians, with all manner of cords by all the dear good excellent folks, who look on that old mediaeval den with a kind of fetish-worship, sprung of their having been kept out of it so long, and it would be an utter smash of all their hearts if I uttered a profane word against it.  I would as soon be an ancient Egyptian drowning a cat as move a stone of it.  It is a lovely sort of ancient Pompeii, good to look at now and then, but not to be bound down to.”