e to drink in this music, and carried it home in
her heart. She was Elspeth, and that dear heart was almost too full
at this time. I hesitate whether to tell or to conceal how it even
created a disturbance in no less a place than the House of Commons.
She was there with Mrs. Jerry, and the thing was recorded in the
papers of the period in these blasting words: "The Home Secretary was
understood to be quoting a passage from 'Letters to a Young Man,' but
we failed to catch its drift, owing to an unseemly interruption from
the ladies' gallery."

"But what was it you cried out?" Tommy asked Elspeth, when she thought
she had told him everything. (Like all true women, she always began in
the middle.)

"Oh, Tommy, have I not told you? I cried out, 'I'm his sister.'"

Thus, owing to Elspeth's behaviour, it can never be known which was
the passage quoted in the House; but we may be sure of one thing--that
it did the House good. That book did everybody good. Even Pym could
only throw off its beneficent effects by a tremendous effort, and
young men about to be married used to ask at the bookshops, not for
the "Letters," but simply for "Sandys on Woman," acknowledging Tommy
as the authority on the subject, like Mill on Jurisprudence, or
Thomson and Tait on the Differential Calculus. Controversies raged
about it. Some thought he asked too much of man, some thought he saw
too much in women; there was a fear that young people, knowing at last
how far short they fell of what they ought to be, might shrink from
the matrimony that must expose them to each other, now that they had
Sandys to guide them, and the persons who had simply married and
risked it (and it was astounding what a number of them there proved to
be) wrote to the papers suggesting that he might yield a little in the
next edition. But Sandys remained firm.

At first they took for granted that he was a very aged gentleman; he
had, indeed, hinted at this in the text; and when the truth came out
("And just fancy, he is not even married!") the enthusiasm was
doubled. "Not engaged!" they cried. "Don't tell that to me. No
unmarried man could have written such a eulogy of marriage without
being on the brink of it." Perhaps she was dead? It ran through the
town that she was dead. Some knew which cemetery.

The very first lady Mr. Sandys ever took in to dinner mentioned this
rumour to him, not with vulgar curiosity, but delicately, with a hint
of sympathy in waiting, and it