s feet, and his altogether that----"

"That what?" asked her friend.

"That you can't expect a girl to then, if you insist upon it."

"Some girl will, you'll see, one of these days."

"What!--even that man with teeth!" This was some chance acquaintance,
useful for illustration, but not in the story. Laetitia knew enough of
him to give a testimonial.

"He's a very good fellow, whatever you may say!" said she.

"My dear Tishy! Goodness is the distinguishing feature of the opposite
sex. I speak as a person of my own. Men's moral qualities are always
high. If it wasn't for their appearance, and their manners, and their
defective intelligences, they would make the most charming husbands."

"How very young you are!" Miss Wilson said, superior experience oozing
out at every pore. Sally might have passed this by, but when it came
to patting you on the cheek, she drew a line.

"Tishy dear, do you mean to go on like that, when I'm a hundred and you
are a hundred and five?"

"Yes, dear. At least, I can't say. Anything may have happened by then."

"What sort of thing? Come, Tishy, don't be enigmatical. For instance?"

"You'll change your mind and be wiser--you'll see." Which might have
been consecutive in another conversation. But it was insufferably
patronizing in Laetitia to evade the centenarian forecast that should
have come in naturally, and retreat into a vague abstraction, managing
to make it appear (Sally couldn't say how or why) that her own general
remarks about man, which meant nothing, were a formal proclamation
of celibacy on her part. It is odd how little the mere wording of
a conversation may convey, especially girl's conversation. What _is_
there in the above to warrant what came next from Sally?

"If you mean Dr. Vereker, that's ridiculous."

"I never mentioned his name, dear."

"Of course you didn't; you couldn't have, and wouldn't have. But
anybody could tell what you meant, just the same, by leaving your mouth
open when you'd done speaking." We confess freely that we should not
have known, but what are we? Why _should_ Laetitia's having left her
lips slightly ajar, instead of closing them, have "meant Dr. Vereker"?

But the fact is--to quote an expression of Sally's own--brain-waves
were the rule and not the exception with her. And hypnotic suggestion
raged as between her and Miss Laetitia Wilson, interrupting practice,
and involving the performers in wide-ranging, irrelevant discussion. It
was