difficult to get on with?"

"Intolerable. . . . They want me to be a peer and a privy councillor.
I've come out here partly in order to settle the matter. It's got to be
settled. Either I must go to the bar, or I must stay on in Cambridge. Of
course, there are obvious drawbacks to each, but the arguments certainly
do seem to me in favour of Cambridge. This kind of thing!" he waved his
hand at the crowded ballroom. "Repulsive. I'm conscious of great powers
of affection too. I'm not susceptible, of course, in the way Hewet
is. I'm very fond of a few people. I think, for example, that there's
something to be said for my mother, though she is in many ways so
deplorable. . . . At Cambridge, of course, I should inevitably become
the most important man in the place, but there are other reasons why I
dread Cambridge--" he ceased.

"Are you finding me a dreadful bore?" he asked. He changed curiously
from a friend confiding in a friend to a conventional young man at a
party.

"Not in the least," said Helen. "I like it very much."

"You can't think," he exclaimed, speaking almost with emotion, "what
a difference it makes finding someone to talk to! Directly I saw you I
felt you might possibly understand me. I'm very fond of Hewet, but he
hasn't the remotest idea what I'm like. You're the only woman I've ever
met who seems to have the faintest conception of what I mean when I say
a thing."

The next dance was beginning; it was the Barcarolle out of Hoffman,
which made Helen beat her toe in time to it; but she felt that after
such a compliment it was impossible to get up and go, and, besides
being amused, she was really flattered, and the honesty of his conceit
attracted her. She suspected that he was not happy, and was sufficiently
feminine to wish to receive confidences.

"I'm very old," she sighed.

"The odd thing is that I don't find you old at all," he replied. "I feel
as though we were exactly the same age. Moreover--" here he hesitated,
but took courage from a glance at her face, "I feel as if I could talk
quite plainly to you as one does to a man--about the relations between
the sexes, about . . . and . . ."

In spite of his certainty a slight redness came into his face as he
spoke the last two words.

She reassured him at once by the laugh with which she exclaimed, "I
should hope so!"

He looked at her with real cordiality, and the lines which were drawn
about his nose and lips slackened for the first time.