Whichever it was, her fascination was so persuasive that he found himself yielding to her proposal as if it were the most natural thing in the world.  He accepted it as humbly, as gratefully, as gravely, as if it were a thing actually in her power to bestow.  If he could have suspected her of any intention to patronize him, he could not have resented it, knowing as he did its pathetic impotence.

“I know it isn’t the best way,” she said, “but it is a way.

“It’s a glorious way.”

“I don’t know about the glory.  But you will see Florence and Venice and Rome, and they are glorious.”

Yes, he would see them, if she said so.  Why not?  In this ideal and fantastic world, could any prospect be more ideal and fantastic than another?

“And you will have plenty of time to yourself.  You will be a great deal alone.  Too much alone perhaps.  You must think of that.  It might really be better for you to stay in London where you are beginning to make friends.”

Was she trying to break it to him as gently, as delicately as possible that there would be no intimacy between him and her?  That as her private secretary his privacy would be painfully unbroken?

She saw it and corrected herself.  “Friends, I mean, who may be able to help you more.  You must choose between the two advantages.  It will be a complete break with your old life.”

“That would be the best thing that could happen to me.”

This time she did not see.  “Well—­don’t be in a hurry.  There isn’t any hurry.  Remember, it means a whole year out of your life.”

A whole year out of his life?  Was that the way she looked at it?

Yes.  She was giving him his chance; but she did not conceive herself to be giving him anything more.  She understood him sufficiently to trust him; her insight went so far and no farther.  She actually believed that there could be a choice for him between seeing her every day for a whole year and never seeing her again.  Evidently she had not the remotest conception of his state of mind.  He doubted whether it could have occurred to her to allow for the possibility of her private secretary falling in love with her in the innermost privacy of his secretaryship.  He saw that hers was not the order of mind that entertains such possibilities on an intimate footing.  She was generous, large-sighted; he understood that she would let herself be carried away on the superb sweep of the impersonal, reckless of contingencies.  He also understood that with this particular private secretary she would consider herself safe.  The social difference was as much her protection as some preposterous incompatibility of age.  And as if that were not enough, in their thoughts they were so akin that she might feel herself guarded from him by some law of spiritual consanguinity.

“Oh, my life—­” he said with a queer short laugh that sounded like a sob,—­“well, I must be getting back to my work.”