The conversation was now fairly under way.  They were walking side by side beneath the swaying boughs.  Mr. Lewisham’s sensations were ecstatic, marred only by a dread of some casual boy coming upon them.  She had not read much Carlyle.  She had always wanted to, even from quite a little girl—­she had heard so much about him.  She knew he was a Really Great Writer, a very Great Writer indeed.  All she had read of him she liked.  She could say that.  As much as she liked anything.  And she had seen his house in Chelsea.

Lewisham, whose knowledge of London had been obtained by excursion trips on six or seven isolated days, was much impressed by this.  It seemed to put her at once on a footing of intimacy with this imposing Personality.  It had never occurred to him at all vividly that these Great Writers had real abiding places.  She gave him a few descriptive touches that made the house suddenly real and distinctive to him.  She lived quite near, she said, at least within walking distance, in Clapham.  He instantly forgot the vague design of lending her his “Sartor Resartus” in his curiosity to learn more about her home.  “Clapham—­that’s almost in London, isn’t it?” he said.

“Quite,” she said, but she volunteered no further information about her domestic circumstances, “I like London,” she generalised, “and especially in winter.”  And she proceeded to praise London, its public libraries, its shops, the multitudes of people, the facilities for “doing what you like,” the concerts one could go to, the theatres. (It seemed she moved in fairly good society.) “There’s always something to see even if you only go out for a walk,” she said, “and down here there’s nothing to read but idle novels.  And those not new.”

Mr. Lewisham had regretfully to admit the lack of such culture and mental activity in Whortley.  It made him feel terribly her inferior.  He had only his bookishness and his certificates to set against it all—­and she had seen Carlyle’s house!  “Down here,” she said, “there’s nothing to talk about but scandal.”  It was too true.

At the corner by the stile, beyond which the willows were splendid against the blue with silvery aments and golden pollen, they turned by mutual impulse and retraced their steps.  “I’ve simply had no one to talk to down here,” she said.  “Not what I call talking.”

“I hope,” said Lewisham, making a resolute plunge, “perhaps while you are staying at Whortley ...”

He paused perceptibly, and she, following his eyes, saw a voluminous black figure approaching.  “We may,” said Mr. Lewisham, resuming his remark, “chance to meet again, perhaps.”

He had been about to challenge her to a deliberate meeting.  A certain delightful tangle of paths that followed the bank of the river had been in his mind.  But the apparition of Mr. George Bonover, headmaster of the Whortley Proprietary School, chilled him amazingly.  Dame Nature no doubt had arranged the meeting of our young couple, but about Bonover she seems to have been culpably careless.  She now receded inimitably, and Mr. Lewisham, with the most unpleasant feelings, found himself face to face with a typical representative of a social organisation which objects very strongly inter alia to promiscuous conversation on the part of the young unmarried junior master.