"Aha! Uncle Joseph used to wonder that, did he? Why?"
"He said," continued Philip, warming to his subject as the familiar phrases came back to him, "that there is no parallel to the female mind in any other branch of Nature."
"That is true," remarked Mr. Mablethorpe approvingly. "I should like to meet Uncle Joseph. Go on."
"It seems incredible," pursued Philip, with a curiously incongruous expression of intense wisdom upon his honest and ingenuous features, "that Providence should handicap its own beautifully designed human engines by placing them in daily contact with such a piece of uncontrolled and ill-balanced mechanism as Woman."
"Oho!" said Mr. Mablethorpe, manipulating the oil-pump, to the noisome satisfaction of Boanerges; "Uncle Joseph said that, did he?"
"Yes; and he said putting women near a man was like putting a lot of bar-magnets round a compass. And he said they were parasites, too, actuated by predatory instincts. They—"
But Mr. Mablethorpe interrupted him.
"Uncle Joseph, I take it," he said, "is a married man."
"Oh, no," replied Philip, "he is a bachelor. He never allows a woman into his house, even to wash,—at least, he never did until the other day, when the Beautiful Lady came. And then—well, I didn't know what to think, sir," he concluded helplessly.
"This," commented Mr. Mablethorpe, "is elliptical but interesting. Proceed, my infant misogynist. Who was the Beautiful Lady, and why did she call?"