‘I assure your excellency I will not.’
‘Ten days hence, or so, you know.’
‘Exactly, after it is all over.’
‘And can’t be helped. What a comfort it is, now and then, that Can’t be helped!’
‘It is the root and marrow of all philosophy. Your practical man, poor wretch, will try to help this and that, and torment his soul with ways and means, and preventives and forestallings; your philosopher quietly says—It can’t be helped. If it ought to be, it will be—if it is, it ought to be. We did not make the world, and we are not responsible for it.—There is the sum and substance of all true wisdom, and the epitome of all that has been said and written thereon from Philo the Jew to Hypatia the Gentile. By the way, here’s Cyril coming down the steps of the Caesareum. A very handsome fellow, after all, though lie is looking as sulky as a bear.’
‘With his cubs at his heels. What a scoundrelly visage that tall fellow-deacon, or reader, or whatever he is by his dress—has!’
‘There they are—whispering together. Heaven give them pleasant thoughts and pleasanter faces!’
‘Amen!’ quoth Orestes, with a sneer: and he would have said Amen in good earnest, had he been able to take the liberty—which we shall—and listen to Cyril’s answer to Peter, the tall reader.
‘From Hypatia’s, you say? Why, he only returned to the city this morning.’
‘I saw his four-in-hand standing at her door, as I came down the Museum Street hither, half an hour ago.’