or four hours in the
morning. After that you would be absolutely free."

And still he said nothing. But the fine long nervous hands tortured
each other in their clasp. So this was what came of keeping up the
farce?

"Of course," she said, "you must think it over."

"Miss Harden, I don't know how to thank you. I don't know what to
say."

"Don't say anything. Think."

"I don't know what to think."

But he was thinking hard; trying to realize where he was and what was
being proposed to him. To have entertained the possibility of such a
proposal in the middle of last week would have argued that he was
drunk. And here he was indubitably, conspicuously sober. Sober? Well,
not exactly. He ought never to have taken that little cup of black
coffee! Was there any difference between drinking champagne with Miss
Poppy Grace and drinking coffee with Lucia Harden, when the effect was
so indistinguishably the same? Or rather, for completeness and
splendour of hallucination there was no comparison. He was drunk,
drunk as he had never been drunk before, most luminously, most
divinely intoxicated with that little cup of black coffee.

And yet her scheme was entirely in keeping with that ideal and
fantastic world he lived in; a world which in the last six days had
yet, for him, the illusion of reality. He was aware that it _was_
illusion. An illusion which she blindly shared.

He was overcome by the appalling extent of his knowledge and her
ignorance. She thought she was rich; he knew that she was in all
probability poor. She thought a hundred a year (or thereabouts) an
insignificant sum; he knew that before long she might have less than
that to live on. She thought herself at the present moment a wise and
understanding woman. He knew that she was a child. A child playing
with its own beautiful imagination.

He wondered how much of him she understood. Should he tell her that
she did not understand him at all; that she was engaging as her
private secretary a young man who drank, who was quite shockingly
drunk no longer ago than the middle of last week; a young man who was
an intimate friend of a lady whom it was impossible to describe
accurately in her presence? Or did she understand him better than he
understood himself? Had she, with her child's innocence, the divine
lucidity of a child? Did she fail to realize his baser possibilities
because they were the least real part of him? Or was she, in this,
ideal and fantastic too