'Are they quite definitely engaged?' asked Merton.

'Yes they are now, by letter, and she says she will wait for him till I
die, or she is twenty-six, if I don't give my consent. He writes every
mail, from places with outlandish names, in Africa. And she keeps
looking in a glass ball, like the labourers' women, some of them; she's
sunk as low as _that_; so superstitious; and sometimes she tells me that
she sees what he is doing, and where he is; and now and then, when his
letters come, she shows me bits of them, to prove she was right. But
just as often she's wrong; only she won't listen to _me_. She says it's
Telly, Tellyopathy. I say it's flat nonsense.'

'I quite agree with you,' said Merton, with conviction. 'After all,
though, honest, as far as you hear. . . .'

'Oh yes, honest enough, but that's all,' interrupted Mrs. Nicholson, with
a hearty sneer.

'Though he bears a good character, from what you tell me he seems to be a
very silly young man.'

'Silly Johnny to silly Jenny,' put in Mrs. Nicholson.

'A pair with ideas so absurd could not possibly be happy.' Merton
reasoned. 'Why don't you take her into the world, and show her life?
With her fortune and with _you_ to take her about, she would soon forget
this egregiously foolish romance.'

'And me to have her snapped up by some whipper-snapper that calls himself
a lord? Not me, Mr. Graham,' said Mrs. Nicholson. 'The money that her