suffered some great wrong; his naturally beautiful, brave, generous
disposition was soured; he had lost faith in God and in woman, and it
remained for her to restore his belief, to teach him that his
fellow-creatures were in the main animated with the most excellent
motives, and to drive away all those strange, wild opinions of his, and
generally brighten and sweeten his life and turn him out a new man. She
could not have explained how she was going to accomplish all this, but
every maiden is at heart a missionary of some sort, and Lucy had a vague
idea that the influence of a good woman was always effective in such
cases. She never imagined that the youth would test her pretty, heartfelt
opinions and her glowing faith in the rightness of things in the cold,
sceptical light of his logic.

'Women don't bother themselves much to know if things are true,' he said.
'They're content with thinking they ought to be true.'

'Well,' she answered, 'why not try to be true to the things that ought to
be true?'

'If I wanted to, the world wouldn't let me.'

'You cannot believe that. The really good man is always obeyed and
reverenced.'

'And has always a fat billet. Yes; that kind of goodness is an excellent
thing as a speculation.'

She thought him wilfully paradoxical, and it came about, when their
acquaintanceship was about three weeks old, that while Jim Done, the
small and early philosopher, held Lucy in fine disdain as a born fool,