he said. "I like best to have it out. Do you know, Lucy,
that it is supposed your sex are all of that mind? You believe what you
like, and the reason for your faith does not trouble you. You must not
suppose that you are singular in that respect."

To this she listened without any response at all either in words or
look, except, perhaps, a little lifting of her eyelids in faint
surprise; for Lucy was not concerned about what was common to her sex.
Nor did she take such questions at all into consideration. Therefore,
this speech sounded to her irrelevant; and so quick was Sir Tom's
intelligence that, though he made it as a sort of conventional
necessity, he saw that it was irrelevant too. It might have been all
very well to address a clever woman who could have given him back his
reply in such words. But to Lucy's straightforward, simple, limited
intellect such dialectics were altogether out of place. Her very want of
capacity to understand them made them a disrespect to her which she had
done nothing to deserve. He coloured in his quick sense of this, and
sudden perception that his wife in the limitation of her intellect and
fine perfection of her moral nature was such an antagonist as a man
might well be alarmed to meet, more alarmed even than she generously was
to displease him.

"I beg your pardon, Lucy," he said, "I was talking to you as if you were
one of the ordinary people. All this must be treated between you and me
on a different footing. I have a great deal more experience than you
have, and I ought to know better. You must let me show you how it
appears to me. You see I don't pretend not to know what the point was. I
have felt for a long time that it was one that must be cleared up
between you and me. I never thought of Jock coming in," he said with a
laugh. "That is quite a new and unlooked-for feature; but begging his
pardon, though he is a clever fellow, we will leave Jock out of the
question. He can't be supposed to have much knowledge of the world."

"No," said Lucy, with a little suspicion. She did not quite see what
this had to do with it, nor what course her husband was going to adopt,
nor indeed at all what was to follow.

"Your father's will was a very absurd one," he said.

At this Lucy was slightly startled, but she said after a moment, "He did
not think what hard things he was leaving me to do."

"He did not think at all, it seems to me," said Sir Tom; "so far as I
can see he merely amused