practical,--I mean productive, as cattle and turnip crops
are,--a succession of Somerses and Wileses is not to be hoped for.
History never repeats itself."

"May I answer you, though very humbly?"

"Miss Travers, the wisest man that ever existed never was wise enough
to know woman; but I think most men ordinarily wise will agree in this,
that woman is by no means a humble creature, and that when she says she
'answers very humbly,' she does not mean what she says. Permit me to
entreat you to answer very loftily."

Cecilia laughed and blushed. The laugh was musical; the blush was--what?
Let any man, seated beside a girl like Cecilia at starry twilight, find
the right epithet for that blush. I pass it by epithetless. But she
answered, firmly though sweetly,--

"Are there not things very practical, and affecting the happiness, not
of one or two individuals, but of innumerable thousands, in which a man
like Mr. Chillingly cannot fail to feel interest, long before he is my
father's age?"

"Forgive me: you do not answer; you question. I imitate you, and ask
what are those things as applicable to a man like Mr. Chillingly?"

Cecilia gathered herself up, as with the desire to express a great deal
in short substance, and then said,--

"In the expression of thought, literature; in the conduct of action,
politics."

Kenelm Chillingly stared, dumfounded. I suppose the greatest enthusiast
for woman's rights could not assert more reverentially than he did the
cleverness of women; but among the things which the cleverness of woman
did not achieve, he had always placed "laconics." "No woman," he was
wont to say, "ever invented an axiom or a proverb."

"Miss Travers," he said at last, "before we proceed further, vouchsafe
to tell me if that very terse reply of yours is spontaneous and
original; or whether you have not borrowed it from some book which I
have not chanced to read?"

Cecilia pondered honestly, and then said, "I don't think it is from any
book; but I owe so many of my thoughts to Mrs. Campion, and she lived so
much among clever men, that--"

"I see it all, and accept your definition, no matter whence it came.
You think I might become an author or a politician. Did you ever read an
essay by a living author called 'Motive Power'?"

"No."

"That essay is designed to intimate that without motive power a man,
whatever his talents or his culture, does nothing practical. The
mainsprings of motive power are Want and