"I think you are a little one-sided, if you will excuse my saying so."
"Please don't talk like that. How could I help being grateful for an honest opinion?—the more unlike my own, the better for me. Was I dogmatic again? Please remember that, whatever I say, I am feeling after the truth all the time."
He looked at her, smiling.
"But such as your metaphor is, let us carry it a little bit farther. Let us suppose that your garden is laid out in a land where the soil is poor and the people are starving. You know of a vegetable which would abundantly repay the trouble of cultivation, and would make all the difference between starvation and comparative comfort; but no one will believe in it. We will suppose that you yourself have ample means of livelihood, and are not dependent on any such thing. Would you not, nevertheless, sacrifice the symmetry of your flower-beds and grow my imaginary vegetable, if only to convince 'A. who comes down the highroad, and B. who looks over the hedge,' that starvation is needless?"
Mona smiled and held out her hand.
"Well said!" she cried cordially. "A good answer, and given with my own clumsy weapon. I admit that I would try to exercise 'conscious influence' in the very rare cases in which I felt called upon to be a reformer. But I am glad that is not required of me in the matter of church-going."
"And the whole, wide, puzzling subject of Compromise?" he said. "Is there nothing in that?"
Mona's face became very grave. "Yes," she said, "there is a great deal in that—though I believe, as some one says, that we studiously refrain from hurting people in the first instance, only to hurt them doubly and trebly when the time comes—there is a great deal in the puzzling subject of Compromise; but it has not come much into my life. There has been no one to care——"
Suddenly she laughed again and changed the subject abruptly.
"It is so odd," she said, "so natural, so like our humanity, that we should argue like this—you in favour of conscious influence, I against it—and I make not the smallest doubt that your life is incomparably simpler, franker, more straightforward than mine."