nly and bowed over it with deference. She walked
down the path without a word; Fyne had preceded her and was waiting by
the open gate. They passed out and walked up the road surrounded by a
low cloud of dust raised by the dog gyrating madly about their two
figures progressing side by side with rectitude and propriety, and (I
don't know why) looking to me as if they had annexed the whole
country-side. Perhaps it was that they had impressed me somehow with
the sense of their superiority. What superiority? Perhaps it consisted
just in their limitations. It was obvious that neither of them had
carried away a high opinion of me. But what affected me most was the
indifference of the Fyne dog. He used to precipitate himself at full
speed and with a frightful final upward spring upon my waistcoat, at
least once at each of our meetings. He had neglected that ceremony this
time notwithstanding my correct and even conventional conduct in
offering him a cake; it seemed to me symbolic of my final separation
from the Fyne household. And I remembered against him how on a certain
day he had abandoned poor Flora de Barral--who was morbidly sensitive.

I sat down in the porch and, maybe inspired by secret antagonism to the
Fynes, I said to myself deliberately that Captain Anthony must be a fine
fellow. Yet on the facts as I knew them he might have been a dangerous
trifler or a downright scoundrel. He had made a miserable, hopeless
girl follow him clandestinely to London. It is true that the girl had
written since, only Mrs Fyne had been remarkably vague as to the
contents. They were unsatisfactory. They did not positively announce
imminent nuptials as far as I could make it out from her rather
mysterious hints. But then her inexperience might have led her astray.
There was no fathoming the innocence of a woman-like Mrs Fyne who,
venturing as far as possible in theory, would know nothing of the real
aspect of things. It would have been comic if she were making all this
fuss for nothing. But I rejected this suspicion for the honour of human
nature.

I imagined to myself Captain Anthony as simple and romantic. It was
much more pleasant. Genius is not hereditary but temperament may be.
And he was the son of a poet with an admirable gift of individualising,
of etherealising the commonplace; of making touching, delicate,
fascinating the most hopeless conventions of the so-called refined
existence.

What I could not under