“I’ll get you to meet him some day—if you are not for ever out of England.... Why didn’t you ask me what I thought of the poems myself?”

“I thought you would tell me.”

“I’m scarcely a year older than you.”

“Does that matter? It depends on what you were born and what you have read.”

“I have read——” She broke off suddenly. “But no; I am sure poetry depends very much on what you have been through.”

There was a pause.

“Mr. Alter, if he heard us, would say we were very young,” John said.

Margaret looked back over their conversation and laughed.

“Have we been taking ourselves so seriously? Look at my great-grandmother. She is telling us to get along with us into the drawing-room.”