said Professor Fortescue.

"Or at least you never pray," added Hadria.

Both Professors looked at her, each with an expression of enquiry. It
was difficult to understand from exactly what sources of experience or
intuition the singular remark could have sprung.

The conversation took a slight swerve.

Professor Theobald contended that all our fond distinctions of vice and
virtue, right and wrong, were mere praise and blame of conditions and
events.

"We like to fancy the qualities of character inherent, while really they
are laid on by slow degrees, like paint, and we name our acquaintance by
the colour of his last coat."

This view offended Miss Du Prel. Joseph Fleming and Lord Engleton
rallied round her. Hubert Temperley joined them. Man, the sublime, the
summit of the creation, the end and object of the long and painful
processes of nature; sin-spotted perhaps, weak and stumbling, but still
the masterpiece of the centuries--was this great and mysterious creature
to be thought of irreverently as a mere plain surface for _paint_? Only
consider it! Professor Theobald's head went down between his shoulders
as he laughed.

"The sublime creature would not look well _un_painted, believe me."

"He dare not appear in that plight even to himself, if Theobald be right
in what he stated just now," said Professor Fortescue.

"Life to a character is like varnish to wood," asserted Miss Du Prel;
"it brings out the grain."

"Ah!" cried Professor Theobald, "Then _you_ insist on varnish, I on
paint."

"There is a difference."

"And it affects your respective views throughout," added Professor
Fortescue, "for if the paint theory be correct, then it is true that to
know one's fellows is impossible, you can only know the upper coat;
whereas if the truth lies in varnish, the substance of the nature is
revealed to you frankly, if you have eyes to trace the delicacies of the
markings, which tell the secrets of sap and fibre, of impetus and check:
all the inner marvels of life and growth that go forward in that most
botanic thing, the human soul."

"Professor Fortescue is eloquent, but he makes one feel distressingly
vegetable," said Temperley.

"Oh! not unless one has a human soul," Lady Engleton reassured him.

"Am I to understand that you would deprive me of mine?" he asked, with a
courtly bow.

"Not at all; souls are private property, or ought to be."

"I wish one could persuade the majority of that!" cried Profess