“Yes, if you think you can trust me,” said Audrey, concealing, with amazing ease and skill, her excitement and her mighty pleasure in the scene....  “He wouldn’t dream of telling it to Madame Piriac.” ...It is doubtful whether she had ever enjoyed anything so much, and yet she was as prim as a nun.

“I’m not a happy man, Mrs. Moncreiff.  Materially, I’ve everything a man can want, I suppose.  But I’m not happy.  You may laugh and say it’s my liver.  But it isn’t.  You’re a woman of the world; you know what life is; and yet experience hasn’t spoilt you.  I could say anything to you; anything!  And you wouldn’t be shocked, would you?”

“No,” said Audrey, hoping, nevertheless, that he would not say “anything, anything,” but somehow simultaneously hoping that he would.  It was a disconcerting sensation.

“I want you always to remember that I’m unhappy and never to tell anybody,” Mr. Gilman resumed.

“But why?”

“It will be a kindness to me.”

“I mean, why are you unhappy?”

“My opinions have all changed.  I used to think I could be independent of women.  Not that I didn’t like women!  I did.  But when I’d left them I was quite happy.  You know what the facts of life are, Mrs. Moncreiff.  Young as you are you are older than me in some respects, though I have a long life before me.  It’s just because I have a long life before me—­dyspeptics are always long-lived—­that I’m afraid for the future.  It wouldn’t matter so much if I was an old man.”

“But,” asked Audrey adventurously, “why should you be unhappy because your opinions have changed?  What opinions?” She endeavoured to be perfectly judicial and indifferent, and yet kind.

“What opinions?  Well, about Woman Suffrage, for instance.  You remember that night at the Foas’, and what I remarked afterwards about what you all said?”

“Yes, I remember,” said Audrey.  “But can you remember it?  Fancy you remembering a thing like that!”

“I remember every word that was said.  It changed me....  Not at first.  Oh, no!  Not for several days, perhaps weeks.  I fought against it.  Then I said to myself, ‘How absurd to fight against it!’ ...  Well, I’ve come to believe in women having the vote.  You’ve no more stanch supporter than I am.  I want women to have the vote.  And you’re the first person I’ve ever said that to.  I want you to have the vote.”

He smiled at her, and she saw scores and scores of excellent qualities in his smile; she could not believe that he had any defect whatever.  His secret was precious to her.  She considered that he had confided it to her in a manner both distinguished and poetical.  He had shown a quality which no youth could have shown.  Youths were inferior, crude, incomplete.  Not that Mr. Gilman was not young!  Emphatically he was young, but her conception of the number of years comprised in youthfulness had been enlarged.  She saw, as in a magical enlightenment, that forty was young, fifty was young, any age was young provided it had the right gestures.  As for herself, she was without age.  The obvious fact that Mr. Gilman was her slave touched her; it saddened her, but sweetly; it gave her a new sense of responsibility.