“Did you have a plan, Mrs. Ulswater?” I asked after a while.
“You needn't pretend you didn't know what it was.”
“I suspected it when it began to succeed.”
Dr. Ulswater took off his glasses and pointed them vaguely at me.
“As to the date of your suspicions,” he said, “you are an authority, but as to the date of the success of Mrs. Ulswater's plan, you are in error, in error. Mrs. Ulswater's plans begin to succeed when she begins to make them. The beginning of the end is coincident with the beginning of the beginning. She has an arrangement with destiny. She i——”
“Stuff!” said Mrs. Ulswater.
“Not at all! Not at all!” he cried. “I'll bet Hannah Atkins to a fresh infant that Mrs. Ulswater laid the lines of your future a year and a half ago, and started for a predestined Island of Clementina, and collected a foreordinate orphan whom she had spotted from the description of the late Mr. Tupper. 'Susannah,' she said to herself, 'will do for Kit. We'll go to Clementina.' Pundits, prime ministers, and reigning monarchs she picked up by way—populations rioted as she found convenient—mere incidental details to a further end. Through helplessly remonstrant oceans, through a universe undisciplined and disorderly, she pursued the judicious tenor of her way. Here and there she altered the trend of history. It was nothing. Missions! Not at all. Her purpose was to make a match. The feminine mind——”
“Fiddlesticks!” said Mrs. Ulswater.