“Yes, that's all I'm distinguished for, as yet!” said Eric (so we soon got to call him) with a winning smile. “And I doubt,” glancing at Lady Muriel, “if it even amounts to a good-conduct-badge! But it's something to begin with.”
“You must come to my father, Eric,” said Lady Muriel. “I think he's wandering among the ruins.” And the pair moved on.
The gloomy look returned to Arthur's face: and I could see it was only to distract his thoughts that he took his place at the side of the metaphysical young lady, and resumed their interrupted discussion.
“Talking of Herbert Spencer,” he began, “do you really find no logical difficulty in regarding Nature as a process of involution, passing from definite coherent homogeneity to indefinite incoherent heterogeneity?”
Amused as I was at the ingenious jumble he had made of Spencer's words, I kept as grave a face as I could.
“No physical difficulty,” she confidently replied: “but I haven't studied Logic much. Would you state the difficulty?”
“Well,” said Arthur, “do you accept it as self-evident? Is it as obvious, for instance, as that 'things that are greater than the same are greater than one another'?”
“To my mind,” she modestly replied, “it seems quite as obvious. I grasp both truths by intuition. But other minds may need some logical—I forget the technical terms.”
“For a complete logical argument,” Arthur began with admirable solemnity, “we need two prim Misses—”
“Of course!” she interrupted. “I remember that word now. And they produce—?”