. "I don't mean money obligations; though there's that,
too--Horace knows all about it. I don't know if I can explain--" She
laid her hands in her lap and looked at Edith and beyond her, with
liquid and untroubled eyes; not seeing her, but seeing things very far
off, invisible from Edith's point of view; which things she must
endeavour, if possible, to make her see. "The kind of obligations I
mean are so difficult to describe, because there's nothing to take
hold of. Only, when you've once made a man believe in you and trust
you, so that he comes to you ever afterwards expecting nothing but
wonderful discernment, and irreproachable tact, and--and an almost
impalpable delicacy of treatment, and you know that you failed in all
these things just when he needed them most, you do feel some
obligations. There's the obligation to make up for your blunders; the
obligation to think about him in a certain way because no other way
does justice to his idea of you; the obligation to show him the same
consideration he showed to you; the obligation to take a simple
kindness from him as he would have taken it from you--"

"My _dear_ Lucia, you forget that a man may accept many things from a
woman that she cannot possibly accept from him."

"Yes, but they are quite another set of things. They don't come into
it at all. That's where you make the mistake, Edith. I've got--for my
own sake--to behave to that man as finely as he behaved to me. I owe
him a sort of spiritual redress. I always shall owe it him; but I'm
doing something towards it now." She said to herself, "I am a fool to
try to explain it to her. She'll never understand. I wish Kitty were
here. She would have understood in a minute."

Edith did not understand. She thought that Lucia's perceptions in
this matter were blunt, when they were only superlatively fine.

"All this," said she, "implies an amount of intimacy that I was not
aware of."

"Intimacy? Yes, I suppose it _is_ intimacy, of a sort."

"And how it could have happened with a man like that--"

"A man like what?"

"Well, my dear girl, a man that Horace wouldn't dream of allowing you
to meet, even in his own house."

"Horace? You talk about my being under an obligation. It was he who
helped to put me under it."

"And how?"

"By never delivering one of my messages to him; by letting him believe
that I behaved horribly to him; that I sent him away and never gave
him a thought--when he had been so magnificent