Philistia

go out trout-fishing with him this afternoon. Come u

on't mind if I do. Let me carry your things; it's rat

d colours, and they turned togeth

it. The granite blocks were very high and rather slippery in places, for it was rainy April weather, so that Ernest had to take his companion's hand more than once in his to help her over the tallest boulders. It was a small delicate hand, though Hilda was a tall well-grown woman; ungloved, too, for the sake of the sketching; and Hilda didn't seem by any means unwilling to accept Ernest's proffered help, though if it had been Lord Connemara who was with her instead, she would have scorned assistance, and s

camp-stool and papers. 'That's a good point of view for the rocks yonder. You

lar duffer at painting and sketching. You should ask Lord

ry at home, and he's been told by sensible men what's the right thing for him to say

not feeling any burning desire to discuss Lord

they get artists and people who understand about pictures to talk with them, and so they learn what's considered the proper thing to say of each of them. But as to saying

'you're evidently prejudiced against your own people. I should think that if there's any subjec

the good of advantages without a head on your shoulders, I should like to know. A

among peers and peers' sons. All history shows it; and it would be absurd if it weren't so; for the mass of peers have got their peerages by conspicuous abilities

d fellow to talk to. And there's Wilfrid Faunthorp, who writes poems, and gets them printed in the magazines, too, because he knows the editors. And there's Randolph Hastings, who goes in for painting, and has little red and blue daubs at the Grosvenor by special invitation

idering the relative frequency of peers and commoners in this realm of England. Peers, y

. It's most unlucky, under the circumstances, that I should happen to be the daughter of one peer, and be offered promiscuously as wife to the highest bidder among half a dozen others, if onl

her and smiled,

any girl admire or love him? And yet half the girls in London would be glad to get him, for all his absurdity. It's monstrous, it's incomprehensible, it's abominable; but it's the fact. For my part, I must say I do like a little originality. And whenever I hear Papa, and Uncle Sussex, and Lord Connemara talking at dinner, it does seem to me too ridiculou

nd only answered, 'There are a great many queer inequalities and

ways, after all! Even that silly Lord Connemara would have guessed what she was driving at, with only a quarter as much encouragement. But E

ut cutting all the landlords' heads off, I'm sure, though you said when I spoke about it before Mamma, the night you first came here, that yo

dlords-by which I meant to say, get rid of them as landlords, not as individuals. I don't even know that I'd take away the lan

ours. If it's ours, you ought to leave it to us for ever; and if it isn't ours, you ought to take it away from us at once, a

ump and straightforward. But in practice it would be better, no doubt, gradually to educate out the landlords, rather than to dispossess them at one blow of what they honestly, though wrongly, imagine to be their own

ose this person and his descendants went on for a great many generations extorting money out of other people by threatening to kill them and letting them off on payment of a ransom. Suppose, too, they always killed three a year, some time or other, pour encourager les autres-just to show that they really meant it. Well, then, if one day the people grew wise enough to inquire into the right of the

people's, and there's no reason on earth why they should starve a minute longer in order to let Lord Connemara pay three thousand guineas for spurious copies of

should like to know all about everything, but what chance has one at Dunbude? Do you know, till you came here, I never got any sensible conversation with anybody.' And she sighed gently as she put her head on one side to take a good view of her sketchy little picture. Lady Hi

l choose for myself, and marry a man for the worth that's in him, I assure you it's a positive fact, I've been proposed to by no fewer than six assorted Algies and Berties and Monties in a single season; besides which some o

his head they'd call it; but what does that matter? I WON'T marry a fool, and I WILL marry a man of some originality. That's the only thing in the world worth troubling one's head about. Why on earth doesn't he take my hand, I wonder? What further can he be waiting for?' Lady Hilda was perfectly accustomed to the usual preliminaries of

will do quite right, Lady Hilda, to marry the man o

igh, this time a genuine one, to her half-sketched outline. 'I shall bring him round in time,' she said to herself, blushing a little at her unexpected discomfiture. 'I shall bring him round in time; I shall make him propose to me! I don't care if I have to live in a lodging with him, and wash up my own tea-things; I shall marry him; that I'm resolved upon. He's as mad as a March hare about his Communism and his theories and

help me,' she thought, blushing.) 'Come and walk with me? It's no use trying to draw with one's hands freezing.' And she crumpled up the unfinished sketch hastily between her finge

ess for dinner. 'I shall manage to marry him, somehow; or if I don't marry him, at any rate I'll marry som