'A woman of honourable feeling, nephew, would be careful to do nothing

to hinder you in your career, as this putting of herself in your way

most certainly will. Yet I hear that she professes a great anxiety on

this same future of yours as a physicist. The best way in which she

can show the reality of her anxiety is by leaving you to yourself.

Perhaps she persuades herself that she is doing you no harm. Well,

let her have the benefit of the possible belief; but depend upon it

that in truth she gives the lie to her conscience by maintaining such

a transparent fallacy. Women's brains are not formed for assisting at

any profound science: they lack the power to see things except in the

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concrete. She'll blab your most secret plans and theories to every

one of her acquaintance--' 'She's got none!' said Swithin, beginning to get warm.

'--and make them appear ridiculous by announcing them before they are

matured. If you attempt to study with a woman, you'll be ruled by her

to entertain fancies instead of theories, air-castles instead of

intentions, qualms instead of opinions, sickly prepossessions instead

of reasoned conclusions. Your wide heaven of study, young man, will

soon reduce itself to the miserable narrow expanse of her face, and

your myriad of stars to her two trumpery eyes.

'A woman waking a young man's passions just at a moment when he is

endeavouring to shine intellectually, is doing little less than

committing a crime.

'Like a certain philosopher I would, upon my soul, have all young men

from eighteen to twenty-five kept under barrels; seeing how often, in

the lack of some such sequestering process, the woman sits down before

each as his destiny, and too frequently enervates his purpose, till he

abandons the most promising course ever conceived!

'But no more. I now leave your fate in your own hands. Your well-

wishing relative, 'JOCELYN ST. CLEEVE,

_Doctor in Medicine_.'

As coming from a bachelor and hardened misogynist of seventy-two, the

opinions herein contained were nothing remarkable: but their practical

result in restricting the sudden endowment of Swithin's researches by

conditions which turned the favour into a harassment was, at this unique

moment, discomfiting and distracting in the highest degree.

Sensational, however, as the letter was, the passionate intention of the

day was not hazarded for more than a few minutes thereby. The truth was,

the caution and bribe came too late, too unexpectedly, to be of

influence. They were the sort of thing which required fermentation to

render them effective. Had St. Cleeve received the exhortation a month

earlier; had he been able to run over in his mind, at every wakeful hour

of thirty consecutive nights, a private catechism on the possibilities

opened up by this annuity, there is no telling what might have been the

stress of such a web of perplexity upon him, a young man whose love for

celestial physics was second to none. But to have held before him, at

the last moment, the picture of a future advantage that he had never once

thought of, or discounted for present staying power, it affected him

about as much as the view of horizons shown by sheet-lightning. He saw

an immense prospect; it went, and the world was as before.




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