air Greek."

"Thank you, thank you, Miss Blue-stocking; I am quite satisfied with
your English version. You positively alarm me, Angela. Most people are
quite content if they can put a poem written in English into Greek;
you reverse the process, and, having coolly given expression to your
thoughts in Greek, condescend to translate them into your native
tongue. I only wish you had been at Cambridge, or--what do they call
the place?--Girton. It would have been a joke to see you come out
double-first."

"Ah!" she broke in, blushing, "you are like Mr. Fraser, you overrate
my acquirements. I am sorry to say I am not the perfect scholar you
think me, and about most things I am shockingly ignorant. I should
indeed be silly if, after ten years' patient work under such a scholar
as Mr. Fraser, I did not know some classics and mathematics. Why, do
you know, for the last three years that we worked together, we used as
a rule to carry on our ordinary conversations during work in Latin and
Greek, month and month about, sometimes with the funniest results. One
never knows how little one does know of a dead language till one tries
to talk it. Just try to speak in Latin for the next five minutes, and
you will see."

"Thank you, I am not going to expose my ignorance for your amusement,
Angela."

She laughed.

"No," she said, "it is you who wish to amuse yourself at my expense by
trying to make me believe that I am a great scholar. But what I was
going to say, before you attacked me about my fancied acquirements,
was that, in my opinion, your remark about the whole world being under
sentence of death, was rather a morbid one."

"Why? It is obviously true."

"Yes, in a sense; but to my mind this scene speaks more of
resurrection than of death. Look at the earth pushing up her flowers,
and the dead trees breaking into beauty. There is no sign of death
there, but rather of a renewed and glorified life."

"Yes, but there is still the awful _fact_ of death to face; Nature
herself has been temporarily dead before she blooms into beauty; she
dies every autumn, to rise again in the same form every spring. But
how do we know in what form _we_ shall emerge from the chrysalis? As
soon as a man begins to think at all, he stands face to face with this
hideous problem, to the solution of which he knows himself to be
drawing daily nearer. His position, I often think, is worse than that
of a criminal under sentence, because the criminal is on