“Anyway”—­her voice was still uncertain—­“I might have been disfigured—­disfigured for life!”

“I don’t know why you should dwell upon it now it’s done with,” he declared, smiling.

“It would be strange, wouldn’t it, if I took it quite for granted—­all in the day’s work?” She held out her hand:  “I am grateful—­please.”

He bowed over it, laughing, again with that eighteenth-century air which might have become a Chevalier des Grieux.

“May I exact a reward?”

“Ask it.”

“Will you take me down with you to your village?  I know you are going.  I must walk on afterwards and catch a midday train to Widrington.  I have an appointment there at two o’clock.  But perhaps you will introduce me to one or two of your poor people first?”

Marcella assented, went upstairs, changed her dress, and put on her walking things, more than half inclined all the time to press her mother to go with them.  She was a little unstrung and tremulous, pursued by a feeling that she was somehow letting herself go, behaving disloyally and indecorously towards whom?—­towards Aldous?  But how, or why?  She did not know.  But there was a curious sense of lost bloom, lost dignity, combined with an odd wish that Mr. Wharton were not going away for the day.  In the end, however, she left her mother undisturbed.

By the time they were half way to the village, Marcella’s uncomfortable feelings had all passed away.  Without knowing it, she was becoming too much absorbed in her companion to be self-critical, so long as they were together.  It seemed to her, however, before they had gone more than a few hundred yards that he was taking advantage—­presuming on what had happened.  He offended her taste, her pride, her dignity, in a hundred ways, she discovered.  At the same time it was she who was always on the defensive—­protecting her dreams, her acts, her opinions, against the constant fire of his half-ironical questions, which seemed to leave her no time at all to carry the war into the enemy’s country.  He put her through a quick cross-examination about the village, its occupations, the incomes of the people, its local charities and institutions, what she hoped to do for it, what she would do if she could, what she thought it possible to do.  She answered first reluctantly, then eagerly, her pride all alive to show that she was not merely ignorant and amateurish.  But it was no good.  In the end he made her feel as Antony Craven had constantly done—­that she knew nothing exactly, that she had not mastered the conditions of any one of the social problems she was talking about; that not only was her reading of no account, but that she had not even managed to see these people, to interpret their lives under her very eyes, with any large degree of insight.