I would
talk it over with you, Miss Francie. I thought there might be something
in that; that the way might seem clearer. But I see no way at all,
unless you were to go to him yourself. He would listen to you. Or he
might even listen to me, if I represented to him that you were
distressed at the condition of affairs. At present he doesn't appear to
care what happens to him."

They had crossed the common; they had come to the foot of the wood; and
they did not go on to the highway, for Miss Francie suggested that the
sylvan path was the more interesting. And so they passed in among the
trees, making their way through the straggling undergrowth, while the
soft March wind blew moist and sweet all around them, and the blackbirds
and thrushes filled the world with their silver melody, and in the more
distant woods the ringdoves crooned. Maurice Mangan followed her--in
silence. Perhaps he was thinking of Lionel; perhaps he was thinking of
the confession she had made in crossing the common; at all events, he
did not address her; and when she stooped to gather some hyacinths and
anemones he merely waited for her. But as they drew near to the farther
end of the coppice the path became clearer, and now he walked by her
side.

"Miss Francie," he said (and it was _his_ eyes that were cast down now),
"you were speaking of the ideals that girls in the country may form for
themselves--and girls everywhere, I dare say; but don't you think it
rather hard?"

"What is?"

"Why, that you should raise up an impossible standard, and that poor
common human beings, with all their imperfections and disqualifications,
are sent to the right about."

"Oh, no," Miss Francie said, cheerfully. "You don't understand at all. A
girl does not form her ideal out of her own head. She is not clever
enough to do that; or, rather, she is not stupid enough to try to do
that. She takes her ideal from some one she knows--from the finest type
of character she has met; so that it is not an impossible standard, for
one person, at least, has attained to it."

"And, for the sake of that one, she discards all those unfortunates who,
by their age or appearance or lack of position or lack of distinction,
cannot hope to come near," he said, rather absently. "Isn't that hard?
It makes all sorts of things so hopeless, so impossible. You put your
one chosen friend on this pedestal; and then all the others, who might
wish to win your regard, they know what the result