“I should have wanted to trip you up for that speech, too; so you see the likeness is proved.  It is a funny thing, I know very few Englishmen.  I’ve met several, but, as you say, I never had any real conversation with them.”

“Maybe, if you had, you wouldn’t be so down on your sex when it has reached adolescence.”

[Illustration:  “‘DO YOU KNOW,’ SAID I, ‘YOU ARE A VERY QUEER BOY’".]

“I’m afraid there isn’t much difference in men, whatever their country.  But it’s—­their attitude towards women which I hate.”

I laughed.  “What do you know about that?”

“I have a sister,” said he, after a minute’s pause.  And he did not laugh.  “She and I have been—­tremendous chums all our lives.  There isn’t a thing she has done, or a thought she has had, that I don’t know, and the other way round, of course.”

“Twins?” I asked.

“She is twenty-one.”

“Oh, four or five years older than you.”

The boy evidently did not take this as a question.  “She is unfortunately an heiress,” he said.  “Money has brought misery upon her, and through her, on me; for if she suffers, I suffer too.  She used to believe in everybody.  She thought men were even more sincere and upright than women, because their outlook on life was larger, and so it was easy for her to be deceived.  When she came out she wasn’t quite eighteen (you see we have no father or mother, only a lazy old guardian-uncle), and she thought everyone was wonderfully kind to her, so she was very happy.  I suppose there never was a happier girl—­for a while.  But by-and-bye she began to find out things.  She discovered that the men who seemed the nicest only cared for her money, not for her at all.”

“How could she be sure of that?”

“It was proved, over and over again, in lots of ways.”

“But if she is a pretty and charming girl——­”

“I think she is only odd—­like me.  People don’t understand her, especially men.  They find her strange, and men don’t like girls to be strange.”

“Don’t they?  I thought they did.”

“Think for yourself.  Have you ever been at all in love?  And if you have, wasn’t the girl quite, quite conventional; just a nice sweet girl, who was pretty, and who flirted, and who was too properly brought up ever to do or to say anything to surprise you?”

“Well,” I admitted, my mind reviewing this portrait of Helen, which was really a well-sketched likeness, “now you put it in that way, I confess the girl I’ve cared for most was of the type you describe.  I can see that now, though I didn’t think of it then.”