you
pleasure,--I daresay there is; we're so confoundedly uppish in the way we
look at things. If either of them had a particle of drawing or a scrap of
taste, if both of them weren't as bare as a broomstick of the least
vestige of gift, or any suspicion of knowledge, there might be a good
deal to say for them! Only, my dear Miss Bretherton, you see it's really
not a matter of opinion; I assure you it isn't. I could prove to you as
plain as that two and two make four, that Halford's figures don't join in
the middle, and that Forth's men and women are as flat as my hand--there
isn't a back among them! And then the taste, and the colour, and the
clap-trap idiocy of the sentiment! No, I don't think I can stand it. I am
all for people getting enjoyment where they can," with a defiant look at
me, "and snapping their fingers at the critics. But one must draw the
line somewhere. There's some art that's out of court from the beginning."

'I couldn't resist it.

'"Don't listen to him, Miss Bretherton," I cried. "If I were you I
wouldn't let him spoil your pleasure; the great thing is to _feel_;
defend your feeling against him! It's worth more than his criticisms."

'Forbes's eyes looked laughing daggers at me from under his shaggy white
brows. Mrs. Stuart and Wallace kept their countenances to perfection; but
I had him, there's no denying it.

'"Oh, I know nothing about it," said Isabel Bretherton, divinely
unconscious of the little skirmish going on around her. "You must teach
me, Mr. Forbes. I only know what touches me, what I like--that's all I
know in anything."

'"It's all we any of us know," said Wallace airily. "We begin with 'I
like' and 'I don't like,' then we begin to be proud, and make
distinctions and find reasons; but the thing beats us, and we come back
in the end to 'I like' and 'I don't like.'"

'The lunch over, we strolled out along the common, through heather which
as yet was a mere brown expanse of flowerless undergrowth, and copses
which overhead were a canopy of golden oak-leaf, and carpeted underneath
with primroses and the young up-curling bracken. Presently through a
little wood we came upon a pond lying wide and blue before us under the
breezy May sky, its shores fringed with scented fir-wood and the whole
air alive with birds. We sat down under a pile of logs fresh-cut and
fragrant, and talked away vigorously. It was a little difficult often to
keep the conversation on lines which did not exclude M