much now.  But I did learn one thing from all that—­I learned to know when a man isn’t decent.  I can’t tell you how I know—­it’s all over him—­it’s all over me—­it’s his eyes, the way he stands, the expression of his mouth—­I don’t only see it—­I feel it—­I feel it the way a thermometer feels it when you put a match under the bulb ...  I know!” She brought her extravagant, her preposterous, her ignorant, her incredibly convincing claims to an abrupt end.

“And you ‘feel’ that I ...” began Arnold, and could not go on.

“I’d like you for my brother,” she said gently.

He tried to laugh at her, but the honest tears were in his eyes.  “You don’t know what you’re talking about, you silly dear,” he said unsteadily, “but I’m awfully glad you came to Lydford.”

With her instinct for avoiding breaks, rough places, Sylvia quickly glided into a transition from this speech back into less personal talk.  “Another queer thing about that experience I’ve never understood:—­it cured me of being so crazy about clothes.  You wouldn’t think it would have anything to do with that, would you?  And I don’t see how it did.  Oh, I don’t mean I don’t dearly love pretty dresses now.  I do.  And I spend altogether too much time thinking about them—­but it’s not the same.  Somehow the poison is out.  I used to be like a drunkard who can’t get a drink, when I saw girls have things I didn’t.  I suppose,” she speculated philosophically, “I suppose any great jolt that shakes you up a lot, shakes things into different proportions.”

“Say, that fellow must have been just about the limit!” Arnold’s rather torpid imagination suddenly opened to the story he had heard.

“No, no!” said Sylvia.  “As I look back on it, I make a lot more sense out of it” (she might have been, by her accent, fifty instead of twenty-three), “and I can see that he wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought him.  When I said he wasn’t decent, I meant that he belonged in the Stone Age, and I’m twentieth-century.  We didn’t fit together.  I suppose that’s what we all mean when we say somebody isn’t decent ... that he’s stayed behind in the procession.  I don’t mean that man was a degenerate or anything like that ... if he could have found a Stone Age woman he’d have ... they’d have made a good Stone Age marriage of it.  But he didn’t, the girl he....”

“Do you know, Sylvia,” Arnold broke in wonderingly, “I never before in all my life had anybody speak to me of anything that really mattered.  And I never spoke this way myself.  I’ve wanted to, lots of times; but I didn’t know people ever did.  And to think of its being a girl who does it for me, a girl who....”  His astonishment was immense.

“Look here, Arnold,” said Sylvia, with a good-natured peremptoriness.  “Let a girl be something besides a girl, can’t you!”

But her attempt to change the tone to a light one failed.  Apparently, now that Arnold had broken his long silence, he could not stop himself.  He turned towards her with a passionate gesture of bewilderment and cried:  “Do you remember, before dinner, you asked me as a joke what was the use of anything, and I said I didn’t know?  Well, I don’t! I’ve been getting sicker and sicker over everything.  What the devil am I here for, anyhow!”