"The shop is awful. You can imagine nothing worse than the truth."
"A nice sphere for Mona Maclean!"
"Oh, my dear, there is sphere enough in all conscience—only too much sphere! I never saw so clearly in my life before that nothing depends on what a man does, but that everything depends on how he does it. Even that twopenny-halfpenny shop might be made a centre of culture and taste and refinement for the whole neighbourhood."
"You would have to get rid of your cousin first."
"I don't know. One would rather have quite a free hand. But she is wonderfully liberal about things that must seem sheer nonsense to her."
"She well may be!"
"That is absurd. Why should she pay in appreciation for qualities that she does not in the least want, and would rather be without? You must not judge of my suitability to her by my suitability to—you, for instance."
"Then she does not even appreciate you?"
Mona meditated before replying. "She likes me," she said, "but she thinks me absurdly 'superior' one minute, and gratuitously frivolous the next. She has not got hold of the main thread of my character, so of course she thinks me a bundle of inconsistencies."
"Why do you stay?"