markedly and deliberately liberal-minded in his
manner in all their encounters. He conveyed not only his sense of the
extreme want of correctitude in their unsanctioned meetings, but also
that, so far as he was concerned, this irregularity mattered not at
all, that he had flung--and kept on flinging--such considerations to the
wind.

And, in addition, she was now seeing and talking to Ramage almost
weekly, on a theory which she took very gravely, that they were
exceptionally friends. He would ask her to come to dinner with him in
some little Italian or semi-Bohemian restaurant in the district toward
Soho, or in one of the more stylish and magnificent establishments about
Piccadilly Circus, and for the most part she did not care to refuse.
Nor, indeed, did she want to refuse. These dinners, from their lavish
display of ambiguous hors d'oeuvre to their skimpy ices in dishes of
frilled paper, with their Chianti flasks and Parmesan dishes and their
polyglot waiters and polyglot clientele, were very funny and bright;
and she really liked Ramage, and valued his help and advice. It was
interesting to see how different and characteristic his mode of approach
was to all sorts of questions that interested her, and it was amusing to
discover this other side to the life of a Morningside Park inhabitant.
She had thought that all Morningside Park householders came home before
seven at the latest, as her father usually did. Ramage talked always
about women or some woman's concern, and very much about Ann Veronica's
own outlook upon life. He was always drawing contrasts between a woman's
lot and a man's, and treating her as a wonderful new departure in this
comparison. Ann Veronica liked their relationship all the more because
it was an unusual one.

After these dinners they would have a walk, usually to the Thames
Embankment to see the two sweeps of river on either side of Waterloo
Bridge; and then they would part at Westminster Bridge, perhaps, and
he would go on to Waterloo. Once he suggested they should go to a
music-hall and see a wonderful new dancer, but Ann Veronica did not feel
she cared to see a new dancer. So, instead, they talked of dancing
and what it might mean in a human life. Ann Veronica thought it was
a spontaneous release of energy expressive of well-being, but Ramage
thought that by dancing, men, and such birds and animals as dance, come
to feel and think of their bodies.

This intercourse, which had been planne