“No, it doesn’t—­when the bringing in is a matter of life and death, perhaps!  As long as I am here and Mrs. Mundy is here, any one can come in who for the moment has nowhere else to go.  Scarborough Square has no walls around its houses.  Whoever needs us is a neighbor.  The girl was ill.”

My voice was indignant.  There are times when Selwyn makes me absolutely furious.  He apparently takes pleasure in pretending to have no heart.  Then, too, he was talking and acting in such contrast to the way I had expected him to talk and act at our first meeting alone after the past weeks, that in amazement I stared at him.  Of self-consciousness or embarrassment there was no sign.  It had obviously not occurred to him that his acquaintanceship with a girl he had given no evidence of knowing when I was present, and three days later had been seen walking with on the street, absorbed in deep and earnest conversation, was a matter I would like to have explained.  The density of men for a moment kept me dumb.

Selwyn has been reared in a school honest in its belief that a woman is too fine and fair a thing to face life frankly; that personal knowledge and understanding on her part of certain verities, certain actualities, did the world no good and woman harm.  But the woman of whom he thought was the sheltered, cultured, cared-for woman of his world.  Protection of her was a man’s privilege and obligation.  Of the woman who has to do her own protecting, fight her way through, meet the demands of those dependent on her, he personally knew little.  It was what he needed much to know.

But because his handsome, haughty mother had lived in high-bred, self-congratulatory ignorance of what she believed did not concern her, and because he has for a sister, who’s a step-sister, a silly, snobby person, he is not justified in withholding from me what he naturally withheld from them.  One can be a human being as well as a lady.  It’s this that is difficult to make him understand.

For a half-moment longer I looked at him, then away.  Apparently he had not heard what I said.

“I should not trouble you.  I have no right, but I don’t know what to do.  I’ve so long come to you—­” He turned to me uncertainly.

“What is it?” I got up from the footstool and took my seat in the corner of the sofa.  “Why shouldn’t you come to me?”

“You have enough on you now.”  He bit his lip.  “It’s about Harrie—­the boy must be crazy.  For the past few weeks he has kept me close to hell.  I never imagined the time would come when I would thank God my father was dead.  It’s come now.”

“What is it, Selwyn?  There is nothing you cannot tell me.”  I leaned forward, my hands twisting in my lap.  I knew more of Harrie than Selwyn knew I knew, but because he was the one person I did know with whom I had no measure of patience, I rarely mentioned his name.  Harrie is Selwyn’s weakness, and to his faults and failings the latter is, outwardly, at least, most inexplicably blind.  He is as handsome as he is unprincipled and irresponsible, and his power to fascinate is seemingly limited only by his desire to exercise it.  “What is it?” I repeated.  “What has he been doing?”