"I almost catch your meaning, but you don't express yourself well, Mr. Thorburn."
"You are quite right. I am given, I am sorry to say, to walking round my thoughts too much." I could have added that such eyes as hers were not calculated to make a man logical or even disputatious, save in a love argument.
"I am then to believe that there is enough good in the world to make it more wicked than it would be were there no good?"
"Why, having advanced my position, I am bound to stick to it. You have said indeed what I think, but what I would not preach."
She stood lost in thought for some moments.
"Mr. Thorburn," she presently said, "I think the world very, very bad; it is cold-hearted, selfish, and dishonourable and mean and pitiless. I see now that it could not be all this if it had not what it calls virtue and religion to prompt it; for the virtue of the world teaches us to hate those whom it pronounces corrupt; and its religion"——she stopped with a bewildered look; "what does its religion teach?"
"History will answer that better than I. But what have we to do with the world, Mrs. Fraser? Here, under that tender sky, amid these flowers, fanned by this soft air, we should not let thoughts of its wrongs and treacheries trouble us."
"If one could throw memory upon the air and bid the breeze bear its burden a thousand miles away, then would it be well. But the afternoon is passing. Good-bye, Mr. Thorburn."
"When may I see you again?"