‘Tell me about American women,’ she said.  All her person was a challenge.  And then:  ‘Would you mind shutting the door after Jack?’ She followed him with her gaze as he crossed and recrossed the room.

‘What about American women?’ he said, dropping all his previous reserve like a garment.  ‘What do you want to know?’

‘I’ve never seen one.  I want to know what makes them so charming.’

The fresh desirous interest in her voice flattered him, and he smiled his content.

‘Oh!’ he drawled, leaning back in his chair, which faced hers by the fire.  ’I never noticed they were so specially charming.  Some of them are pretty nice, I expect, but most of the young ones put on too much lugs, at any rate for an Englishman.’

’But they’re always marrying Englishmen.  So how do you explain that?  I did think you’d be able to tell me about the American women.’

‘Perhaps I haven’t met enough of just the right sort,’ he said.

‘You’re too critical,’ she remarked, as though his case was a peculiarly interesting one and she was studying it on its merits.

’You only say that because I’m over forty and unmarried, Mrs. Stanway.  I’m not at all critical.’

‘Over forty!’ she exclaimed, and left a pause.  He nodded.  ’But you are too critical,’ she went on.  ’It isn’t that women don’t interest you—­they do——­’

‘I should think they did,’ he murmured, gratified.

‘But you expect too much from them.’

‘Look here!’ he said, ‘how do you know?’

She smiled with an assumption of the sadness of all knowledge; she made him feel like a boy again:  ’If you didn’t expect too much from them, you would have married long ago.  It isn’t as if you hadn’t seen the world.’

‘Seen the world!’ he repeated.  ’I’ve never seen anything half so charming as your home, Mrs. Stanway.’

Both were extremely well satisfied with the course of the conversation.  Both wished that the interview might last for indefinite hours, for they had slipped, as into a socket, into the supreme topic, and into intimacy.  They were happy and they knew it.  The egotism of each tingled sensitively with eager joy.  They felt that this was ‘life,’ one of the justifications of existence.

She shook her head slowly.

‘Yes,’ he continued, ’it’s you who stay quietly at home that are to be envied.’

‘And you, a free bachelor, say that!  Why, I should have thought——­’

’That’s just it.  You’re quite wrong, if you’ll let me say so.  Here am I, a free bachelor, as you call it.  Can do what I like.  Go where I like.  And yet I would sell my soul for a home like this.  Something ... you know.  No, you don’t.  People say that women understand men and what men feel, but they can’t—­they can’t.’

‘No,’ said Leonora seriously, ’I don’t think they can—­still, I have a notion of what you mean.’  She spoke with modest sympathy.