ean,' he said, 'though it's a
mighty good thing to measure yourself up against the world and find out
just what your cash value is, but I'm not talking about that; it's the
question of getting your faculties into some sort of working order that
I'm up against. Why don't you study something systematically, something
you can grind at? Biology, if you like, or political economy, or charity
organisation. Begin at once. Master it.'

'Would Dante do, for a beginning?' Helen inquired, smiling rather wanly.
'I brought him down, with an Italian dictionary. Shall I master Dante?'

'I should feel more comfortable about you if it was political economy,'
said Franklin, now smiling back. 'But begin with Dante, by all means.
Personally I found his point of view depressing, but then I read him in
a translation and never got even as far as the Purgatory. Be sure you
get as far as the Paradise, Miss Buchanan, and with your dictionary.'

CHAPTER XIII.

Franklin had all his time free for sitting with Helen under the trees.
Althea's self-reproach, her self-doubt and melancholy, had been effaced
by the arrival of Gerald Digby, and, at that epoch of her life, did not
return at all. She had no time for self-doubt or self-reproach, no time
even for self-consciousness. Franklin had faded into the dimmest
possible distance; she was only just aware that he was there and that
Helen seemed, kindly, to let him talk a good deal to her. She could not
think of Franklin, she could not think of herself, she could think of
nobody but one person, for her whole being was absorbed in the thought
of Gerald Digby and in the consciousness of the situation that his
coming had created. From soft exhilaration she had passed to miserable
depression, yet a depression far different from the stagnant melancholy
of her former mood; this was a depression of frustrated feeling, not of
lack of feeling, and it was accompanied by the recognition of the fact
that she exceedingly disliked Lady Pickering and wished exceedingly that
she would go away. And with it went a brooding sense of delight in
Gerald's mere presence, a sense of delight in even the pain that his
indifference inflicted upon her.

He charmed her unspeakably--his voice, his smile, his gestures--and she
knew that she did not charm him in any way, and that Lady Pickering, in
her very foolishness, did charm him, and the knowledge made her very
grave and careful when she was with him. Delight and pain w