ration, and he condemned all the young and
pretty ones. That hardly seems well-balanced."

"Collaterals on the distaff side," Mr. Fowler put in hastily. "If you
would read Mendel--"

"Mendel? I have read about him." He raised the forefinger of his right
hand. "Very suggestive. If your father was a black rabbit"--he raised
the forefinger of his left--"and your mother was a white rabbit, then
your male children would be"--he raised all the other fingers and paused
as though taken aback by the size of the family--"would be blue
guinea-pigs, with a tendency to club-foot and astigmatism, but your
female children might only be rather clumsy tangoists with a weakness
for cutting their poor relations. That's all I remember, but I _do_ know
that because I studied the charts."

"Very amusing," said Mr. Fowler, indulgently.

Hugh flushed.

"I am sure it can't be that way." Miss Maria flapped her knitting over.
"But everything has changed since my day, and _not_ for the better. The
curtain-cord."

"Beg pardon," muttered Hugh. His mind went on churning nonsense. "There
are two days it is useless to flee from--the day of your death and the
day when your family doesn't care for your jokes.

"For a joke is an intellectual thing,
And a _mot_ is the sword of an angel king.

"Good old Blake. Why do the best people always see jokes? Why does a
really good one make a whole frozen crowd feel jolly and united all of a
sudden?" He pondered on the beneficence of the comic spirit. Hugh was a
born Deist. It gave him no trouble at all to believe that since the
paintings of Velasquez and the great outdoors which he had seen, were
beautiful, so much the more beautiful must be that God whom he had not
seen. It seemed reasonable. As for the horrors like Uncle Hugh's
affair--well, they must be put in for chiaroscuro. A thing couldn't be
all white without being blank. The thought of the shadows, however,
always made him profoundly uncomfortable, and his instinct
right-about-faced to the lighter surface of life. "Anyhow," he broke
silence, "the daughter of Heth must be game. Three to one, and on our
native heath."

He looked appraisingly about the room, pausing at the stiff,
distinguished, grey-haired couple, one on either side of the fire. The
effect was of a highly finished genre picture: the rich wainscot between
low book-shelves, the brooding portraits, the black-blue rug bordered by
a veiled Oriental motive, the black-velvet cushions