“Am I not right?  Isn’t it so?”

“You think that because I don’t leave father and go abroad.”

“You might go abroad and lead a dependent life; you might stay at home and lead an independent life.”

He asked her what offers of marriage she had had.

One was from the Vicar, a widower, a man of fifty, the other from a young man in a solicitor’s office.  She did not care for either, and had not entertained their proposals for a second.

“If you marry anyone, it must be a duke.  Life is a battle; society will get the better of us unless we get the better of society.  Everyone must realise that—­every young man, every young woman.  We must conquer or be conquered.”

Society, he argued, did not require a chaperon from her; society would, indeed, resent a chaperon if she were to appear with one.  Society not only granted her freedom, but demanded that she should exercise it.  As a freelance she would be taken notice of, as a respectable, marriageable girl she would be passed over.  The cradle and the masterpiece were irreconcilable ideals.  He drew an amusing picture of the prima donna’s husband, the fellow who waits with a scarf ready to wind it round the throat of his musical instrument; the fellow who is always on the watch lest someone should walk off with his means of subsistence.  Evelyn listened because she liked to hear him talk; she knew that he was trying to influence her with argument, but it was he himself who was influencing her, she dreaded his presence, not his argument.

She got up and walked across the sward; and as they returned through the flowery village street, the faint May breeze shed the white chestnut bloom about their feet.  It seemed to him better to say nothing; there are times when silence is more potent than speech.  They were walking under the trees of the old Dulwich street, and so charming were the hedge-hidden gardens, and the eighteenth-century houses with white porticoes, that Owen could not but think Dulwich at that moment seemed the natural nativity of the young girl’s career.  A few moments after they were at Dowlands.  She was trembling, and had no strength of will to refuse to ask him in.  She would have had the strength if she had not been obliged to give him her hand.  She had tried to bid him good-bye without giving her hand, and had not succeeded, and while he held her hand her lips said the words without her knowing it.  She spoke unconsciously, and did not know what she had said till she had said it.

And while they waited for tea, Evelyn lay back in a wicker chair thinking.  He had said that life without love was a desert, and many times the conversation trembled on the edge of a personal avowal, and now he was playing love music out of “Tristan” on the harpsichord.  The gnawing, creeping sensuality of the phrase brought little shudders into her flesh; all life seemed dissolved into a dim tremor and rustling of blood; vague colour floated into her eyes, and