“Intolerable. . . .  They want me to be a peer and a privy councillor.  I’ve come out here partly in order to settle the matter.  It’s got to be settled.  Either I must go to the bar, or I must stay on in Cambridge.  Of course, there are obvious drawbacks to each, but the arguments certainly do seem to me in favour of Cambridge.  This kind of thing!” he waved his hand at the crowded ballroom.  “Repulsive.  I’m conscious of great powers of affection too.  I’m not susceptible, of course, in the way Hewet is.  I’m very fond of a few people.  I think, for example, that there’s something to be said for my mother, though she is in many ways so deplorable. . . .  At Cambridge, of course, I should inevitably become the most important man in the place, but there are other reasons why I dread Cambridge—­” he ceased.

“Are you finding me a dreadful bore?” he asked.  He changed curiously from a friend confiding in a friend to a conventional young man at a party.

“Not in the least,” said Helen.  “I like it very much.”

“You can’t think,” he exclaimed, speaking almost with emotion, “what a difference it makes finding someone to talk to!  Directly I saw you I felt you might possibly understand me.  I’m very fond of Hewet, but he hasn’t the remotest idea what I’m like.  You’re the only woman I’ve ever met who seems to have the faintest conception of what I mean when I say a thing.”

The next dance was beginning; it was the Barcarolle out of Hoffman, which made Helen beat her toe in time to it; but she felt that after such a compliment it was impossible to get up and go, and, besides being amused, she was really flattered, and the honesty of his conceit attracted her.  She suspected that he was not happy, and was sufficiently feminine to wish to receive confidences.

“I’m very old,” she sighed.

“The odd thing is that I don’t find you old at all,” he replied.  “I feel as though we were exactly the same age.  Moreover—­” here he hesitated, but took courage from a glance at her face, “I feel as if I could talk quite plainly to you as one does to a man—­about the relations between the sexes, about . . . and . . .”

In spite of his certainty a slight redness came into his face as he spoke the last two words.

She reassured him at once by the laugh with which she exclaimed, “I should hope so!”

He looked at her with real cordiality, and the lines which were drawn about his nose and lips slackened for the first time.

“Thank God!” he exclaimed.  “Now we can behave like civilised human beings.”