him. "I say in the fourteenth, my dear—you're robbing us of a hundred years!"
Her victim yielded without a struggle. "I do seem, in them dark old centuries, sometimes to trip a little." Yet the interruption of his ancient order distinctly discomposed him, all the more that his audience, gaping with a sense of the importance of the fine point, moved in its mass a little nearer. Thus put upon his honour, he endeavoured to address the group with a dignity undiminished. "The Gothic roof is much admired, but the west gallery is a modern addition."
His discriminations had the note of culture, but his candour, all too promptly, struck Mrs. Gracedew as excessive. "What in the name of Methuselah do you call 'modern'? It was here at the visit of James the First, in 1611, and is supposed to have served, in the charming detail of its ornament, as a model for several that were constructed in his reign. The great fireplace," she handsomely conceded, "is Jacobean."
She had taken him up with such wondrous benignant authority—as if, for her life, if they were to have it, she couldn't help taking care that they had it out; she had interposed with an assurance that so converted her—as by the wave of a great wand, the motion of one of her
