"So I do, mother; but the thing rises up and hits me in the face, so to speak; it is like Gehazi in its unnatural whiteness."
"I should let it stand," said Paul, "as an everlasting testimony to the truth that even Mrs. Martin is human, and not beyond the help of tacking-threads. To my mind there is something infinitely pathetic and poetical in the idea. I feel I could write a poem on it, if not a tract."
"I know I shall tell her about it some day," remarked Joanna.
"I'm awfully interested in your passion for speaking the truth," said Isabel; "it is just the other way with me; I always want to say what I feel people want me to say, rather than what I really think."
"How funny! But that is because it is your nature to make yourself pleasant. It is fearfully difficult for me not to make myself disagreeable—while to make myself agreeable is impossible," replied Joanna.
"Poor Joanna," said her mother.
Joanna went on: "I know that people often blame me for saying disagreeable things; but if they only knew how many disagreeable things I keep myself from saying, and how deeply I regret those I do say, they would commend rather than condemn me."
Then Mr. Seaton questioned Isabel about her life abroad, and the conversation never flagged till it was time for Joanna to go to class, and for Paul and Isabel to start for a walk in the lanes round Chayford Cottage.
Isabel's week at Chayford was a great success. The Seatons were charmed with her, and she with them; and as she and Paul had nothing in the world to do but to make love to each other, there was no occasion for jealousies or misunderstandings between them such as came later in the conflicting interests of "a London June".
Isabel revered Paul's father, because he was so courteous and so saintly, and had read more than any man she had ever met; she liked Joanna, because Joanna was good and clever, and possessed a most admirable sense of humour; and she loved Mrs. Seaton, because the minister's wife was the first woman she had ever met who in some degree satisfied the mother-hunger in her heart. And Mrs. Seaton understood Isabel better than any of them did—not excluding even Paul. She knew that there were depths in the girl's soul, whereof Joanna did not dream, and which Paul had not yet sounded; and that—in spite of her sunny light-heartedness—Isabel's nature was very highly strung. Mrs. Seaton trembled for them both when she realized that Paul's masterly touch might prove a little too heavy for so delicate an instrument, and that some of the strings might break under the pressure. But she knew herself powerless to interfere; for she had learnt that what we call influence, other people often call impertinence, and that it is a power which is more prone to do harm than good. When people are seized with the desire to set about improving their neighbours, it is a phase of thought which might be described as the "negative" of the missionary spirit; that it to say, it is a form of spiritual instruction which has the effect of turning Christians into savages—for the time being, at any rate.