Wallace ran down the stairs and was gone.  Kendal walked back slowly into his room and stood meditating.  It seemed to him that Wallace did not quite realise the magnificence of his self-devotion.  ’For, after all, it’s an awkward business,’ he said to himself, shaking his head over his own temerity.  ’How I am to come round a girl as frank, as direct, as unconventional as that, I don’t quite know!  But she ought not to have that play; it’s one of the few good things that have been done for the English stage for a long time past.  It’s well put together, the plot good, three or four strongly marked characters, and some fine Victor Hugoish dialogue, especially in the last act.  But there is extravagance in it, as there is in all the work of that time, and in Isabel Bretherton’s hands a great deal of it would be grotesque:  nothing would save it but her reputation and the get-up, and that would be too great a shame.  No, no; it will not do to have the real thing swamped by all sorts of irrelevant considerations in this way.  I like Miss Bretherton heartily, but I like good work, and if I can save the play from her, I shall save her too from what everybody with eyes in his head would see to be a failure!’

It was a rash determination.  Most men would have prudently left the matter to those whom it immediately concerned, but Kendal had a Quixotic side to him, and at this time in his life a whole-hearted devotion to certain intellectual interests, which decided his action on a point like this.  In spite of his life in society, books and ideas were at this moment much more real to him than men and women.  He judged life from the standpoint of the student and the man of letters, in whose eyes considerations, which would have seemed abstract and unreal to other people, had become magnified and all-important.  In this matter of Wallace and Miss Bretherton he saw the struggle between an ideal interest, so to speak, and a personal interest, and he was heart and soul for the ideal.  Face to face with the living human creature concerned, his principles, as we have seen, were apt to give way a little, for the self underneath was warm-hearted and impressionable, but in his own room and by himself they were strong and vigorous, and would allow of no compromise.

He ruminated over the matter during his solitary meal, planning his line of action.  ‘It all depends,’ he said to himself, ’on that,—­if what Wallace says about her is true, if my opinion has really any weight with her, I shall be able to manage it without offending her.  It’s good of her to speak of me as kindly as she seems to do; I was anything but amiable on that Surrey Sunday.  However, I felt then that she liked me all the better for plain-speaking; one may be tolerably safe with her that she won’t take offence unreasonably.  What a picture she made as she pulled the primroses to pieces—­it seemed all up with one!  And then her smile flashing out—­her eagerness to make amends—­to sweep away a harsh impression—­her pretty gratefulness—­enchanting!’