"It began with my grandfather, whose pet idea was that the energy and money spent on missions should be employed at home for the raising of the lower classes. My father went a step further by deciding the particular form in which the lower classes should reap the benefit, and he died with the hope that the dream of two generations should be realised by me."
"There is quite a touch of poetry in what you tell me," said Miss Brooke. "My family history is more prosaic, but it has a dash of adventure in it. The missionary hobby began with my great-grandfather, who was devoted, body and soul, to it—certainly body, for he was eaten by cannibals. Poor savages!"
"Poor savages!" echoed Paul, for the moment supposing Miss Brooke meant to throw doubts on her ancestor's digestibility.
"Yes, for grandfather went out to preach to them! A very mean revenge, I call that."
"How do you reconcile that statement with your own missionary leanings?" asked Paul, thinking it strange a railway king should be the son of an earnest missionary, and vaguely speculating whether the millionaire was in the habit of giving large sums to "revenge" his grandfather.
"Oh, as a woman I have the right to make contradictory statements. 'Tis a valuable right, and I find it very convenient not to yield it up, though I did learn logic at college."
"But surely it must be ever so much nicer to triumph by logic."
"If one were only sure of triumphing! But I am really in no difficulty, so you will not get an exhibition of logic to-night. My missionary tendencies are purely a matter of instinct, my anti-missionary ones a matter of sentiment. Do not instinct and sentiment pull different ways in human beings? Confess, Mr. Middleton, don't you often want to do things you feel you ought not?"
"More often I don't want to do things I feel I ought to."
"That is a piece of new humour."