‘And I have a Chinese pug.’

‘And no children?’ The words rose to Fenwick’s lips, but remained unspoken.  Perhaps she divined them, for she began hastily to describe her dog—­its tricks and fidelities.  Fenwick could meet her here; for a mongrel fox-terrier—­taken, a starving waif, out of the streets—­had been his companion since almost the first month of his solitude.  Each stimulated the other, and they fell into those legends of dog-life in which every dog-lover believes, however sceptical he may be in other directions.  Till presently she said, with a sigh and a stiffening of her delicate features: 

’But mine shows some symptoms of paralysis.  He was run over last summer.  I’m afraid it will be long and painful.’

Fenwick replied that she should send for the vet. and have the dog painlessly killed.

‘No.  I shall nurse him.’

‘Why should you look on at suffering?’

‘Why not—­if sometimes he enjoys life?’

‘I am thinking of the mistress.’

‘Oh, for us,’ she said, quickly, ’for me—­it is good to be with suffering.’

As she spoke, she drew herself slightly more erect.  Neither tone nor manner showed softness, made any appeal.  The words seemed to have dropped from her, and the strange pride and dignity she at once threw around them made a veiling cloud through which only a man entirely without the finer perceptions would have tried to penetrate.  Fenwick, for all his surface gaucherie, did not attempt it.  But he attacked her generalisation.  With some vehemence he developed against it a Neo-pagan doctrine of joy—­love of the earth and its natural pleasures—­courage to take and dare—­avoidance of suffering—­and war on asceticism.  He poured out a number of undigested thoughts, which showed a great deal of reading, and at least betrayed a personality, whatever value they might have as a philosophy.

She listened with a charming kindness, laughing now and then, putting in a humorous comment or two, and never by another word betraying her own position.  But he was more and more conscious of the double self in her—­of the cultivated, social self she was bringing into play for his benefit, and of something behind—­a spirit watchful and still—­wrapt in a great melancholy—­or perhaps a great rebellion?  And by this sense of something concealed or strongly restrained, she began to affect his imagination, and so, presently, to absorb his attention.  Something exquisite in her movements and looks, also in the quality of her voice and the turn of her phrases, drew from his own crude yet sensitive nature an excited response.  He began to envisage what these highly trained women of the upper class, these raffinees of the world, may be for those who understand them—­a stimulus, an enigma, an education.

It flashed on him that women of this type could teach him much that he wanted to know; and his ambition seized on the idea.  But what chance that she would ever give another thought to the raw artist to whom her father had flung a passing invitation?