'"Oh, I know nothing about it," said Isabel Bretherton, divinely
unconscious of the little skirmish going on around her. "You must teach
me, Mr. Forbes. I only know what touches me, what I like--that's all I
know in anything."

'"It's all we any of us know," said Wallace airily. "We begin with 'I
like' and 'I don't like,' then we begin to be proud, and make
distinctions and find reasons; but the thing beats us, and we come back
in the end to 'I like' and 'I don't like.'"

'The lunch over, we strolled out along the common, through heather which
as yet was a mere brown expanse of flowerless undergrowth, and copses
which overhead were a canopy of golden oak-leaf, and carpeted underneath
with primroses and the young up-curling bracken. Presently through a
little wood we came upon a pond lying wide and blue before us under the
breezy May sky, its shores fringed with scented fir-wood and the whole
air alive with birds. We sat down under a pile of logs fresh-cut and
fragrant, and talked away vigorously. It was a little difficult often to
keep the conversation on lines which did not exclude Miss Bretherton.
Forbes, the Stuarts, Wallace, and I are accustomed to be together, and
one never realises what a freemasonry the intercourse even of a capital
is until one tries to introduce an outsider into it. We talked the
theatre, of course, the ways of different actors, the fortunes of
managers. Isabel Bretherton naturally has as yet seen very little; her
comments were mainly personal, and all of a friendly, enthusiastic kind,
for the profession has been very cordial to her. A month or five weeks
more and her engagement at the _Calliope_ will be over. There are other
theatres open to her, of course, and all the managers are at her feet;
but she has set her heart upon going abroad for some time, and has, I
imagine, made so much money this season that the family cannot in decency