ties which ought not to be. Something had to be said, she
murmured. She had told the girl enough to make her come to the right
conclusion by herself.

"And she did?"

"Yes. Of course. She isn't a goose," retorted Mrs Fyne tartly.

"Then her education is completed," I remarked with some bitterness.
"Don't you think she ought to be given a chance?"

Mrs Fyne understood my meaning.

"Not this one," she snapped in a quite feminine way. "It's all very
well for you to plead, but I--"

"I do not plead. I simply asked. It seemed natural to ask what you
thought."

"It's what I feel that matters. And I can't help my feelings. You may
guess," she added in a softer tone, "that my feelings are mostly
concerned with my brother. We were very fond of each other. The
difference of our ages was not very great. I suppose you know he is a
little younger than I am. He was a sensitive boy. He had the habit of
brooding. It is no use concealing from you that neither of us was happy
at home. You have heard, no doubt... Yes? Well, I was made still more
unhappy and hurt--I don't mind telling you that. He made his way to
some distant relations of our mother's people who I believe were not
known to my father at all. I don't wish to judge their action."

I interrupted Mrs Fyne here. I had heard. Fyne was not very
communicative in general, but he was proud of his father-in-law.
"Carleon Anthony, the poet, you know." Proud of his celebrity without
approving of his character. It was on that account, I strongly suspect,
that he seized with avidity upon the theory of poetical genius being
allied to madness, which he got hold of in some idiotic book everybody
was reading a few years ago. It struck him as being truth itself--
illuminating like the sun. He adopted it devoutly. He bored me with it
sometimes. Once, just to shut him up, I asked quietly if this theory
which he regarded as so incontrovertible did not cause him some
uneasiness about his wife and the dear girls? He transfixed me with a
pitying stare and requested me in his deep solemn voice to remember the
"well-established fact" that genius was not transmissible.

I said only "Oh! Isn't it?" and he thought he had silenced me by an
unanswerable argument. But he continued to talk of his glorious
father-in-law, and it was in the course of that conversation that he
told me how, when the Liverpool relations of the poet's late wife
naturally addressed themselve