dweller in Fool's Paradise and a constant shirker of work. Therefore,
she disliked him. Had she actually known him and talked with him, she
might have liked him better in spite of these faults and shortcomings,
for he was really a pleasant, easygoing youth, who wallowed in
intellectual sloth, but loved physical activity; who will presently
drop easily, and comfortably, and without an effort or a doubt, into
the bosom of the Church, and will develop later on into an admirable
country parson, unless they disestablish the Establishment: in which
case, I do not know what he will do.

But this other man, this man who was coming for an explanation, this
Mr. Arnold Arbuthnot, was, if you please, a very different kind of
pupil. In the first place he was a gentleman, a fact which he
displayed, not ostentatiously, in every line of his letters; next, he
had come to her for instruction--the only pupil she had in that
science, in heraldry, which she loved. It is far more pleasant to be
describing a shield and settling questions in the queer old language
of this queer old science, than in solving and propounding problems in
trigonometry and conic sections. And then--how if your pupil begins to
talk round the subject and to wander into other things? You cannot
very well talk round a branch of mathematics, but heraldry is a
subject surrounded by fields, meadows, and lawns, so to speak, all
covered with beautiful flowers. Into these the pupil wandered, and
Iris not unwillingly followed. Thus the teaching of heraldry by
correspondence became the most delightful interchange of letters
imaginable, set off and enriched with a curious and strange piquancy,
derived from the fact that one of them, supposed to be an elderly man,
was a young girl, ignorant of the world except from books, and the
advice given her by two old men, who formed all her society. Then, as
was natural, what was at first a kind of play, became before long a