at; wait till you
break a front tooth, or lose your collar-stud, or have some other real
trouble to cry over. But now you are making a trouble out of nothing,
and I have no patience with people who make troubles out of nothing; it
seems to me like getting one's boots spoiled by a watering-cart when it
is dry weather; and that is a thing which makes me most frightfully
angry."

"Do many things make you angry, I wonder?"

"Some things and some people."

"Tell me what sort of people make a woman of your type angry."

Elisabeth fell into the trap; she could never resist the opportunity of
discussing herself from an outside point of view. If Alan had said
_you_, she would have snubbed him at once; but the well-chosen words, _a
woman of your type_, completely carried her away. She was not an
egotist; she was only intensely interested in herself as the single
specimen of humanity which she was able to study exhaustively.

"I think the people who make me angry are the unresponsive people," she
replied thoughtfully; "the people who do not put their minds into the
same key as mine when I am talking to them. Don't you know the sort?
When you discuss a thing from one standpoint they persist in discussing
it from another; and as soon as you try to see it from their point of
view, they fly off to a third. It isn't so much that they differ from
you--that you would not mind; there is a certain harmony in difference
which is more effective than its unison of perfect agreement--but they
sing the same tune in another key, and the discords are excruciating.
Then the people who argue make me angry; those who argue about trifles,
I mean."

"Ah! All you women are alike in that; you love discussion, and hate
argument. The cause of which is that you decide things by instinct
rather than by reason, and that therefore--although you know you are
right--you can not possibly prove it."

"Then," Elisabeth continued, "I get very angry with the people who will
bother about non-essentials; who, when you have got hold of the vital
centre of a question, stray off to side issues. They are first-cousins
of the people who talk in different keys."

"I should have said they were the same."

"Well, perhaps they are; I believe you are right. Christopher Thornley
is one of that sort; when you are discussing one side of a thing with
him, you'll find him playing bo-peep with you round the other; and you
never can get him into the right mood at the right