“Does your father complain about that?” I asked.

She turned and looked at me with a complete change of expression.  Her abstraction had vanished, giving place to an air that confessed a deliberate caprice.

“To us,” she said with a laugh that delightfully indulged her father’s weakness.

I needed nothing more to illuminate the relations of the Banks family.  With that single gesture she had portrayed her father’s character, and her own and her mother’s smiling consideration for him.  Nevertheless I was still interested in his attitude towards the Hall—­with Anne as interpreter.  I knew that I should get a version noticeably different from the one her brother had given me on the hill that morning.

“But you said that your father hadn’t much respect for the Jervaises?” I stipulated.

“Not for the Jervaises as individuals,” she amended, “but he has for the Family.  And they aren’t so much a family to him as an Idea, an Institution, a sort of Religion.  Nothing would break him of that, nothing the Jervaises themselves ever could do.  He’d be much more likely to lose his faith in God than in the Rights of the Hall.  That’s one of his sayings.  He says they have rights, as if there was no getting over that.  It’s just like people used to believe in the divine right of kings.”

I do not know whether I was more fascinated by her theme or by her exposition of it.  “Then, how is it that the rest of you...?” I began, but she had not the patience to wait while I finished the question.  She was suddenly eager, vivid, astonishingly alive; a different woman from the Anne who had spoken as if in her sleep, while plunged in some immense, engrossing meditation.

“My mother,” she broke in.  “The Jervaises mean nothing to her, nothing of that sort.  She wasn’t brought up on it.  It isn’t in her blood.  In a way she’s as good as they are.  Her grandfather was an emigre from the Revolution—­not titled except just for the ‘de’, you know—­they had an estate near Rouen ... but all this doesn’t interest you.”

“It does, profoundly,” I said.

She looked at me with a spice of mischief in her eyes.  “Why?” she asked.

It was a tempting opening for a flirtation, but I could not flirt with her.  When I had first heard the clear, soft tones of her voice at the window, I must have known that my meeting with her was a new and decisive experience.  I had always idealised a certain type of woman, and perhaps for that reason I had always held back from the possible disillusions of an exploring intimacy.  But my recognition of Anne had nothing in common with all my old deliberately romantic searchings for a theoretical affinity.  If I had been asked at any time before two o’clock that morning to define my ideal, the definition would not have described Anne.  Indeed, I could never have imagined her.  She was altogether too individual, too positive, too independently real, to fit the mawkish vapourings of a man’s imaginary woman.  There was something about her that conquered me.  Already I was blushingly ashamed of my jealous suspicion that she could sell herself by a marriage with Jervaise.  In all her moods, she appeared to me with an effect that I can only describe as “convincing.”