She shook her head.  “Strange boy!” she observed.

There was a pause.

“It was something Charlie Fearns said, wasn’t it?” she inquired.

She uttered the name “Charlie Fearns” with a certain faint hint of disdain, as if indicating to Denry that of course she and Denry were quite able to put Fearns into his proper place in the scheme of things.

“Oh!” he said.  “So you know all about it?”

“Well,” said she, “naturally it was all over the town.  Mrs Fearns’s girl, Annunciata—­what a name, eh?—­is one of my pupils—­the youngest, in fact.”

“Well,” said he, after another pause, “I wasn’t going to have Fearns coming the duke over me!” She smiled sympathetically.  He felt that they understood each other deeply.

“You’ll find some cigarettes in that box,” she said, when he had been there thirty minutes, and pointed to the mantelpiece.

“Sure you don’t mind?” he murmured.

She raised her eyebrows.

There was also a silver match-box in the larger box.  No detail lacked.  It seemed to him that he stood on a mountain and had only to walk down a winding path in order to enter the promised land.  He was decidedly pleased with the worldly way in which he had said:  “Sure you don’t mind?”

He puffed out smoke delicately.  And, the cigarette between his lips, as with his left hand he waved the match into extinction, he demanded: 

“You smoke?”

“Yes,” she said, “but not in public.  I know what you men are.”

This was in the early, timid days of feminine smoking.

“I assure you!” he protested, and pushed the box towards her.  But she would not smoke.

“It isn’t that I mind you,” she said, “not at all.  But I’m not well.  I’ve got a frightful headache.”

He put on a concerned expression.

“I thought you looked rather pale,” he said awkwardly.

“Pale!” she repeated the word.  “You should have seen me this morning:  I have fits of dizziness, you know, too.  The doctor says it’s nothing but dyspepsia.  However, don’t let’s talk about poor little me and my silly complaints.  Perhaps the tea will do me good.”

He protested again, but his experience of intimate civilisation was too brief to allow him to protest with effectiveness.  The truth was, he could not say these things naturally.  He had to compose them, and then pronounce them, and the result failed in the necessary air of spontaneity.  He could not help thinking what marvellous self-control women had.  Now, when he had a headache—­which happily was seldom—­he could think of nothing else and talk of nothing else; the entire universe consisted solely of his headache.  And here she was overcome with a headache, and during more than half-an-hour had not even mentioned it!