"
Helen was not sensitive. She neither blushed nor cast down her eyes.
But his tenets, thus expounded, had nothing very repulsive in them
so far as she saw, and she made no further objection to them.
As they walked up the garden again, through the many lingering signs
of a more stately if less luxurious existence than that of their
generation, she was calmly listening to a lecture on the ground of
law, namely, the resignation of certain personal rights for the
securing of other and more important ones: she understood, was
mildly interested, and entirely satisfied.
They seated themselves in the summer-house, a little wooden room
under the down-sloping boughs of a huge cedar, and pursued their
conversation--or rather Bascombe pursued his monologue. A lively
girl would in all probability have been bored to death by him, but
Helen was not a lively girl, and was not bored at all. Ere they went
into the house she had heard, amongst a hundred other things of
wisdom, his views concerning crime and punishment--with which, good
and bad, true and false, I shall not trouble my reader, except in
regard to one point--that of the obligation to punish. Upon this
point he was severe.
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