makers, Mrs. Temperley," said Professor Theobald.

"Poor cooks and dressmakers!" murmured Professor Fortescue, "where are
_their_ serenities and urbanities?"

"I would not deprive any person of the good things of life," cried
Valeria; "but at present, it is only a few who can appreciate and
contribute to the delicate essence that I speak of. I don't think one
could expect it of one's cook, after all."

"One is mad to expect anything of those who have had no chance," said
Professor Fortescue. "That nevertheless we consistently do,--or what
amounts to the same thing: we plume ourselves on what chance has enabled
us to be and to achieve, as if between us and the less fortunate there
were some great difference of calibre and merit. Nine times in ten,
there is nothing between us but luck."

"Oh, dear, you _are_ democratic, Professor!" cried Lady Engleton.

"No; I am merely trying to be just."

"To be just you must apply your theory to men and women, as well as to
class and class," Valeria suggested.

"_Mon Dieu!_ but so I do; so I always have done, as soon as I was
intellectually short-coated."

"And would you excuse all our weaknesses on that ground?" asked Lady
Engleton, with a somewhat ingratiating upward gaze of her blue eyes.

"I would account for them as I would account for the weaknesses of my
own sex. As for excusing, the question of moral responsibility is too
involved to be decided off-hand."

The atmosphere of Griffin-land, as Professor Theobald called it, while
becoming to his character, made him a little recklessly frank at times.

He admitted that throughout his varied experience of life, he had found
flattery the most powerful weapon in a skilled hand, and that he had
never known it fail. He related instances of the signal success which
had followed its application with the trowel. He reminded his listeners
of Lord Beaconsfield's famous saying, and chuckled over the unfortunate
woman, "plain as a pike-staff," who had become his benefactress, in
consequence of a discreet allusion to the "power of beauty" and a
well-placed sigh.

"The woman must have been a fool!" said Joseph Fleming.

"By no means; she was of brilliant intellect. But praises of that were
tame to her; she knew her force, and was perhaps tired of the solitude
it induced." Professor Theobald laughed mightily at his own sarcasm.
"But when the whisper of 'beauty' came stealing to her ear (which was by
no means like a shell) it was sur