"You are very beautiful!"

She waved her flower before my eyes as though to put a material obstacle, however frail, between us and smiled; but she looked down presently and laughingly answered:

"That doesn't make you any the less lazy."

I did not wish to be set down permanently in her mind as good for nothing, so I explained:

"I am not incurably so; indeed, at my own work I was industrious; but I never held a scythe in my life."

She looked at me again in open-eyed wonder.

"What was 'your own work'?" asked she.

"I practised law."

"What, nothing but law? Did you never get tired of doing nothing but law?"