CHAPTER III.
There will no man do for your sake, I think, What I would have done for the least word said.
I had wrung life dry for your lips to drink, Broken it up for your daily bread.
-- A.

C.SWINBURNE.
A witty bishop was once heard to remark that one of the difficulties of his social life lay in the fact that all women of forty were exactly alike, and it was impossible to recall their individual label, to which archdeacon, or canon, or form of spinster good works, they belonged.

It would be dangerous, irreverent, to pry further into the recesses of the episcopal, or even of the suffragan, mind.

There are snowy peaks where we lay helpers should fear to tread.

But it may be stated, without laying ourselves open to a suspicion of wishing to undermine the Church, that when the woman of forty in her turn acidly announces, as she not infrequently does, that all young men seem to her exactly alike, she is in a parlous condition.
Yet many women had said that Michael was exactly like every other young man.