“Lucy, you ought to travel for about six months: why, your calm nature is growing quite excitable! Confound Madame Beck! Has the little buxom widow no bowels, to condemn her best teacher to solitary confinement?”

“It was not Madame Beck’s fault,” said I; “it is no living being’s fault, and I won’t hear any one blamed.”

“Who is in the wrong, then, Lucy?”

“Me⁠— Dr. John⁠—me; and a great abstraction on whose wide shoulders I like to lay the mountains of blame they were sculptured to bear: me and Fate.”

“ ‘Me’ must take better care in future,” said Dr. John⁠—smiling, I suppose, at my bad grammar.