some called it.

And Winny struggled and strove with those little legs of hers (jolly
little legs he knew they were, too, in their long black stockings),
strove and struggled, as if her life depended on it, to overtake them.
And it was then that Ransome felt the first pricking of that sense of
tenderness and absurdity.

He felt it again after a long silence when, as they were going toward
Wandsworth Bridge, Winny suddenly addressed him.

"You know," she said, "you needn't trouble about _me_."

"I'm not troublin'," he said. "Leastways--that is--" he hesitated and
was lost.

"You are," said she, with decision, "if you think you've got to see me
home."

He said he thought that, considering the lateness of the hour and the
loneliness of the scene, it was better that he should accompany her.

"But I can accompany myself," said she.

He smiled at the vision of Miss Dymond accompanying herself, at eleven
o'clock at night, too--the idea! He smiled at it as if he saw in it
something tender and absurd. He knew, of course, for he was not
absolutely without experience, that girls said these things; they said
them to draw fellows on; it was their artfulness. There was a word for
it; Ransome thought the word was "cock-a-tree." But Winny Dymond didn't
say those things--the least like that. She said them with the utmost
gravity and determination. You might almost have thought she was
offended but for the absence in her tone of any annoyance or
embarrassment. Her tone, indeed, suggested serene sincerity and a sort
of sympathy, the serious and compassionate consideration of his painful
case. It was as if she had been aware all along of the frightful
predicament he had been placed in by Fred Booty; as if she divined and
understood his anguish in it and desired to help him out. That was
evidently her idea--to help him out.

And as it grew on him--her idea--it grew on him also that there was a
kind of fascination about the little figure in its long dark-blue coat.

She wasn't--he supposed she wasn't--pretty, but he found himself
agreeably affected by her. He liked the queer look of her face, which
began with a sort of squarishness in roundness and ended, with a sudden
startling change of intention, in a pointed chin. He liked the clear
sallow and faint rose of her skin, and her mouth which might have been
too large if it had not been so firm and fine. He liked, vaguely,
without knowing that he liked it, the quietness of her brow