declined to be convinced. He maintained stoutly that to kiss Virginia would be the greatest pleasure that Humanity could offer him. 'And if it is immoral as well as pleasant,' he added, 'I should like it all the better.'

At this the Professor gave a terrible groan; he dropped almost fainting into a chair; he hid his face in his hands; and murmured half-articulately, 'Then I can't tell what to do!' In another instant, however, he recovered himself; and fixing a dreadful look on the curate, 'That last statement of yours,' he said, 'cannot be true; for if it were, it would upset all my theories. It is a fact that can be proved and verified, that if you kissed Virginia it would make you miserable.'

'Pardon me,' said the curate, rapidly moving towards her, 'your notion is a remnant of superstition; I will explode it by a practical experiment.'

The Professor caught hold of the curate's coat-tails, and forcibly pulled him back into his seat.

'If you dare attempt it,' he said, 'I will kick you soundly, and, shocking, immoral man! you will feel miserable enough then.'

The curate was a terrible coward, and very weak as well. 'You are a great hulking fellow,' he said, eyeing the Professor; 'and I am of a singularly delicate build. I must, therefore, conform to the laws of matter, and give in.' He said this in a very sulky voice; and, going out of the room, slammed the door after him.

A radiant expression suffused the face of the Professor. 'See,' he said to Virginia, 'the curate's conversion is already half accomplished. In a few hours more he will be rational, he will be moral, he will be solemnly and significantly happy.'

The Professor talked like this to Virginia the whole morning; but in spite of all his arguments, she declined to be comforted. 'It is all very well,' she said, 'whilst you are in the way. But as soon as your back is turned, I know he will be at me again.'

'Will you never,' said Paul, by this time a little irritated, 'will you never listen to exact thought? The curate is now reflecting; and a little reflection must inevitably convince him that he does not really care to kiss you, and that it would give him very little real pleasure to do so.'

'Stuff!' exclaimed Virginia, with a sudden vigour at which the Professor was thunderstruck. 'I can tell you,' she went on, 'that better men than he have borne kicks for my sake; and to kiss me is the only thing that that little man cares about.—What shall I do?' she exclaimed, bursting into tears. 'Here is one of you insulting me by trying to kiss me; and the other insulting me by saying that I am not worth being kissed!'

'Ah, me!' groaned the poor Professor in an agony, 'here is one third of Humanity plunged in sorrow; and another third has not yet freed itself from vice. When, when, I wonder, will the sublimity begin?'

CHAPTER XI.

At dinner, however, things wore a more promising aspect. The curate had been so terrified by the Professor's threats, that he hardly dared to so much as look at Virginia; and to make up for it, he drank and drank champagne, till the strings of his tongue were loosed, and he was laughing and chattering at a rate that was quite extraordinary. Virginia, seeing herself thus neglected by the curate, began to fear that, as Paul said, he really did not so much care to kiss her after all. She, therefore, put on all her most enticing ways; she talked, flirted, and smiled her best, and made her most effective eyes, that the curate might see what a prize was for ever beyond his reach.

This state of affairs seemed full of glorious promise. Virginia's tears were dried, she had never looked so radiant and exquisite before. The curate had foregone every attempt to kiss Virginia, and yet apparently he was happiness itself; and Paul took him aside, as soon as the meal was over, to congratulate him on the holy state to which exact thought had conducted him. 'You see,' Paul said, 'what a natural growth the loftiest morality is. Virginia doesn't want to be kissed by you. I should be shocked at your doing so shocking a thing as kissing her. If you kissed her, you would make both of us miserable; and, as a necessary consequence, you would be in an agony likewise; in addition to which, I should inevitably kick you.'

'But,' said the curate, 'suppose I kissed Virginia on the sly,—I merely put this as an hypothesis, remember,—and that in a little while she liked it, what then? She and I would both be happy, and you ought to be happy too, because we were.'

'Idiot!' said the Professor. 'Virginia is another man's wife. Nobody really likes kissing another man's wife; nor do wives ever like kissing any one except their husbands. What they really like is what Professor Huxley calls "the undefined but bright ideal of the highest good," which, as he says, exact thought shows us is the true end of existence. But, pooh! what is the use of all this talking? You know which way your higher nature calls you; and, of course, unless men believe in God, they cannot help obeying their higher nature.'

'I,' said the curate, 'think the belief in God a degrading superstition; I think every one an imbecile who believes a miracle possible. And yet I do not care two straws about the highest good. What you call my lower nature is far the strongest; I mean to follow it to the best of my ability; and I prefer calling it my higher, for the sake of the associations.'

This plunged the Professor in deeper grief than ever. He knew not what to do. He paced up and down the verandah, or about the rooms, and moaned and groaned as if he had a violent toothache. Virginia and the curate asked what was amiss with him. 'I am agonising,' he said, 'for the sake of holy, solemn, unspeakably dignified Humanity.'

The curate, seeing the Professor thus dejected, by degrees took heart again, and as Virginia still continued her fascinating behaviour to him, he resolved to try and prove to her that, the test of morality being happiness, the most moral thing she could do would be to allow him to kiss her. No sooner had he begun to propound these views, than the Professor gave over his groaning, seized the curate by the collar, and dragged him out of the room with a roughness that nearly throttled him.

'I was but propounding a theory—an opinion,' gasped the curate. 'Surely thought is free. You will not persecute me for my opinions?'

'It is not for your opinions,' said the Professor, 'but for the horrible effect they might have. Opinions,' he roared, 'can only be tolerated which have no possible consequences. You may promulgate any of those as much as you like; because to do that would be a self-regarding action.'

CHAPTER XII.

'Well,' said the curate, 'if I may not kiss Virginia, I will drink brandy instead. That will make me happy enough; and then we shall all be radiant.'

He soon put his resolve into practice. He got a bottle of brandy, he sat himself down under a palm-tree, and told the Professor he was going to make an afternoon of it.

'Foolish man!' said the Professor; 'I was never drunk myself, it is true; but I know that to get drunk makes one's head ache horribly. To get drunk is, therefore, horribly immoral; and therefore I cannot permit it.'

'Excuse me,' said the curate; 'it is a self-regarding action. Nobody's head will ache but mine; so that is my own look-out. I have been expelled from school, from college, and from my first curacy for drinking. So I know well enough the balance of pains and pleasures.'

Here he pulled out his brandy bottle, and applied his lips to it.

'Oh, Humanity!' he exclaimed, 'how solemn this brandy tastes!'

Matters went on like this for several days. The curate was too much frightened to again approach Virginia. Virginia at last became convinced that he did not care about kissing her. Her vanity was wounded, and she became sullen; and this made the Professor sullen also. In fact, two