difficult,” not a very satisfactory avowal when you came to think it over calmly.  But she remembered how it had thrilled her at the time—­what a blank cheque of possibilities it had seemed.  She remembered, too, the evening when he had talked seriously to her—­very gently, very tenderly, very gravely.  She had thought he was going to say, “I don’t want to be made unhappy,” and, instead, he had said, “I don’t want you to be unhappy.”  That had been a nasty one.  How she had lashed him with her tongue!  What inexhaustible reserves of icy acid she had brought forward.

She had tried to hurt him as much as ever she could.  How hurt had he been?  She wondered.  It was all such very ancient history.  And yet he had gone on being fond of her.  Fonder and fonder—­men were so odd.

So many things had happened since then.  She had been away and he had lost an uncle and inherited a property.  And now she was going to stay with him.  Last time they had met, two years ago, he had talked to her as if they had had a boy and girl affair thirty years before.  She had been very much amused but she had hidden it; hiding your amusement was an essential part of being fond of St. John—­a rule of the game, so to speak.  That was one of the delightful things about him; to like him at all you had to be really devoted to him and when you had reached that stage, all of the qualities that would have been intolerable in other people became subtly lovable.  Somehow they seemed to creep under your wing, compelling you to give them the protection of your own intimate understanding.  It was impossible not to make pets of St. John’s defects.  Ariadne remembered the way he had always tried to keep her out of moral draughts, how he had hated to see her in a room with any one of a doubtful reputation, how her habit of taking off her hat in motors in towns got on his nerves.

“But if it tires my head,” she would say, and he would explain very seriously what an intimate gesture it was.

Then as she always rested before dinner, people would come to tea with her in her bedroom.  St. John didn’t like it at all.  There was to him something inherently disreputable about the horizontal.  If she were too tired to sit up in an armchair, she was too tired to see any one—­except him, of course, who understood her (which was just what he didn’t do).

“But my back does ache so easily.  After all, if I were really ill you wouldn’t mind.”

“That is different.”

“How ill do I have to be before I can abdicate the perpendicular in the presence of a young man?” He consoled himself with the thought that she was extremely, exceptionally innocent.  She told him that thousands of people were extremely, exceptionally innocent.  It was a fact which could never be explained to juries.  St. John doubted it.  He believed in a vast number of rules to which all of the people he liked and most of the people he knew were exceptions.