never have
kissed that nurse-maid if he had not been trying to please Leonora.
Nurse-maids do not travel first-class, and, that day, Edward travelled
in a third-class carriage in order to prove to Leonora that he was
capable of economies. I have said that the Kilsyte case came almost as a
relief to the strained situation that then existed between them. It
gave Leonora an opportunity of backing him up in a whole-hearted and
absolutely loyal manner. It gave her the opportunity of behaving to him
as he considered a wife should behave to her husband.

You see, Edward found himself in a railway carriage with a quite pretty
girl of about nineteen. And the quite pretty girl of about nineteen,
with dark hair and red cheeks and blue eyes, was quietly weeping. Edward
had been sitting in his corner thinking about nothing at all. He had
chanced to look at the nurse-maid; two large, pretty tears came out of
her eyes and dropped into her lap. He immediately felt that he had
got to do something to comfort her. That was his job in life. He was
desperately unhappy himself and it seemed to him the most natural
thing in the world that they should pool their sorrows. He was quite
democratic; the idea of the difference in their station never seems to
have occurred to him. He began to talk to her. He discovered that her
young man had been seen walking out with Annie of Number 54. He moved
over to her side of the carriage. He told her that the report probably
wasn't true; that, after all, a young man might take a walk with Annie
from Number 54 without its denoting anything very serious. And he
assured me that he felt at least quite half-fatherly when he put his arm
around her waist and kissed her. The girl, however, had not forgotten
the difference of her station.

All her life, by her mother, by other girls, by schoolteachers, by the
whole tradition of her class she had been warned against gentlemen. She
was being kissed by a gentleman. She screamed, tore herself away; sprang
up and pulled a communication cord.

Edward came fairly well out of the affair in the public estimation; but
it did him, mentally, a good deal of harm.

IV

IT is very difficult to give an all-round impression of an man. I wonder
how far I have succeeded with Edward Ashburnham. I dare say I haven't
succeeded at all. It is ever very difficult to see how such things
matter. Was it the important point about poor Edward that he was very
well built, carried himself wel