shows some symptoms of paralysis. He was run over last
summer. I'm afraid it will be long and painful.'

Fenwick replied that she should send for the vet. and have the dog
painlessly killed.

'No. I shall nurse him.'

'Why should you look on at suffering?'

'Why not--if sometimes he enjoys life?'

'I am thinking of the mistress.'

'Oh, for us,' she said, quickly, 'for me--it is good to be with
suffering.'

As she spoke, she drew herself slightly more erect. Neither tone nor
manner showed softness, made any appeal. The words seemed to have
dropped from her, and the strange pride and dignity she at once threw
around them made a veiling cloud through which only a man entirely
without the finer perceptions would have tried to penetrate. Fenwick,
for all his surface _gaucherie_, did not attempt it. But he attacked
her generalisation. With some vehemence he developed against it
a Neo-pagan doctrine of joy--love of the earth and its natural
pleasures--courage to take and dare--avoidance of suffering--and war
on asceticism. He poured out a number of undigested thoughts, which
showed a great deal of reading, and at least betrayed a personality,
whatever value they might have as a philosophy.

She listened with a charming kindness, laughing now and then, putting
in a humorous comment or two, and never by another word betraying her
own position. But he was more and more conscious of the double self in
her--of the cultivated, social self she was bringing into play for his
benefit, and of something behind--a spirit watchful and still--wrapt
in a great melancholy--or perhaps a great rebellion? And by this sense
of something concealed or strongly restrained, she began to affect
his imagination, and so, presently, to absorb his attention. Something
exquisite in her movements and looks, also in the quality of her voice
and the turn of her phrases, drew from his own crude yet sensitive
nature an excited response. He began to envisage what these highly
trained women of the upper class, these _raffinees_ of the world, may
be for those who understand them--a stimulus, an enigma, an education.

It flashed on him that women of this type could teach him much that he
wanted to know; and his ambition seized on the idea. But what chance
that she would ever give another thought to the raw artist to whom her
father had flung a passing invitation?

He made haste, indeed, to prove his need of her or some other Egeria;
for she was no soo