get your feet wet? I couldn't manage to empty all the water in the
boat.'

'Oh' cried she, with a toss of her head; I wet feet never hurt young
people.'

There was matter for an admonitory lecture in this. Let me confess I was
about to give it, when she added: But Mr. Pollingray, I am really afraid
that your feet are wet! You had to step into the water when you righted
the boat:

My reply was to jump down by her side with as much agility as I
could combine with a proper discretion. The amateur craft rocked
threateningly, and I found myself grasped by and grasping the pretty
damsel, until by great good luck we were steadied and preserved from the
same misfortune which had befallen her parents. She laughed and blushed,
and we tottered asunder.

'Would you have talked metaphysics to me in the water, Mr. Pollingray?'

Alice was here guilty of one of those naughty sort of innocent speeches
smacking of Eve most strongly; though, of course, of Eve in her best
days.

I took the rudder lines to steer against the sculling of her single
scull, and was Adam enough to respond to temptation: 'I should perhaps
have been grateful to your charitable construction of it as being
metaphysics.'

She laughed colloquially, to fill a pause. It had not been coquetry:
merely the woman unconsciously at play. A man is bound to remember the
seniority of his years when this occurs, for a veteran of ninety and a
worn out young debauchee will equally be subject to it if they do
not shun the society of the sex. My long robust health and perfect
self-reliance apparently tend to give me unguarded moments, or lay me
open to fitful impressions. Indeed there are times when I fear I
have the heart of a boy, and certainly nothing more calamitous can be
conceived, supposing that it should ever for one instant get complete
mastery of my head. This is the peril of a man who has lived soberly.
Do we never know when we are safe? I am, in reflecting thereupon,
positively prepared to say that if there is no fool like what they
call an old fool (and a man in his prime, who can be laughed at, is the
world's old fool) there is wisdom in the wild oats theory, and I shall
come round to my nephew's way of thinking: that is, as far as Master
Charles by his acting represents his thinking. I shall at all events be
more lenient in my judgement of him, and less stern in my allocutions,
for I shall have no text to preach from.

We picked up the hat and the scull in o