hild would grow up--and
so would the tiger. Meanwhile, such expertness qualified by such candour
made it impossible to guess the extent of her personal experience, or
to estimate its effect on her character. She might be any one of a dozen
definable types, or she might--more disconcertingly to her companion and
more perilously to herself--be a shifting and uncrystallized mixture of
them all.

Her talk, as usual, had promptly reverted to the stage. She was eager
to learn about every form of dramatic expression which the metropolis
of things theatrical had to offer, and her curiosity ranged from the
official temples of the art to its less hallowed haunts. Her searching
enquiries about a play whose production, on one of the latter scenes,
had provoked a considerable amount of scandal, led Darrow to throw out
laughingly: "To see THAT you'll have to wait till you're married!" and
his answer had sent her off at a tangent.

"Oh, I never mean to marry," she had rejoined in a tone of youthful
finality.

"I seem to have heard that before!"

"Yes; from girls who've only got to choose!" Her eyes had grown suddenly
almost old. "I'd like you to see the only men who've ever wanted to
marry me! One was the doctor on the steamer, when I came abroad with the
Hokes: he'd been cashiered from the navy for drunkenness. The other was
a deaf widower with three grown-up daughters, who kept a clock-shop in
Bayswater!--Besides," she rambled on, "I'm not so sure that I believe
in marriage. You see I'm all for self-development and the chance to live
one's life. I'm awfully modern, you know."

It was just when she proclaimed herself most awfully modern that she
struck him as most helplessly backward; yet the moment after, without
any bravado, or apparent desire to assume an attitude, she would
propound some social axiom which could have been gathered only in the
bitter soil of experience.

All these things came back to him as he sat beside her in the theatre
and watched her ingenuous absorption. It was on "the story" that her
mind was fixed, and in life also, he suspected, it would always be "the
story", rather than its remoter imaginative issues, that would hold her.
He did not believe there were ever any echoes in her soul...

There was no question, however, that what she felt was felt with
intensity: to the actual, the immediate, she spread vibrating strings.
When the play was over, and they came out once more into the sunlight,
Darrow l