st the world, a door which would never be closed against her or
opened to her enemies.

XXIV

In a little city like Dublin one meets every person whom one knows
within a few days. Around each bend in the road there is a friend, an
enemy, or a bore striding towards you, so that, with a piety which is
almost religious, one says "touch wood" before turning any corner. It
was not long, therefore, until Mary again met the big policeman. He
came up behind her and walked by her side, chatting with a pleasant
ease, in which, however, her curious mind could discover some obscure
distinctions. On looking backwards it seemed to Mary that he had
always come from behind her, and the retrospect dulled his glory to
the diminishing point. For indeed his approach was too consistently
policemanlike, it was too crafty; his advent hinted at a gross
espionage, at a mind which was no longer a man's but a detective's
who tracked everybody by instinct, and arrested his friends instead of
saluting them.

As they walked along Mary was in a fever of discomfort. She wished
dumbly that the man would go away, but for the wealth of the world she
could not have brought herself to hurt the feelings of so big a man.
To endanger the very natural dignity of a big man was a thing which no
woman could do without a pang; the shame of it made her feel hot: he
might have blushed or stammered, and the memory of that would sting her
miserably for weeks as though she had insulted an elephant or a baby.

She could not get away from him. She had neither the courage nor the
experience which enables a woman to dismiss a man without wounding
him, and so, perforce, she continued walking by his side while he
treated her to an intelligent dissertation on current political events
and the topography of the city of Dublin.

But, undoubtedly, there was a change in the policeman, and it was not
difficult to account for. He was more easy and familiar in his speech:
while formerly he had bowed as from the peaks of manly intellect to
the pleasant valleys of girlish incompetence he now condescended from
the loftiness of a policeman and a person of quality to the quaint
gutters of social inferiority. To many people mental inferiority in a
companion has a charm, for it induces in one's proper person a feeling
of philosophic detachment, a fine effect of personal individuality and
superiority which is both bracing and uplifting--there is not any
particular harm in this: