A phrase of Benham’s floated suddenly into her mind, and she found herself repeating it aloud:  “There are no human rights where a principle is involved.”

Vetch laughed.  “That’s not you; it’s Benham.  I recognize it.  He’s the sort that would believe that, I suppose—­the sort that would write a political document in blood if he didn’t have ink.”

“Oh, don’t!” she protested.  There was a grain of truth in the epigram, but she resented it the more keenly for this.

“Well, I may have intended it as a compliment,” rejoined Vetch gaily.  “He would take it that way, I reckon.  And, anyhow, you have heard him make worse flings at me.”

She coloured, admitting and denying at the same time, the truth of his words.  “You could never understand each other.  You are so different.”

He looked at her gravely; but even gravity could not wholly drive the gleam of humour from his eyes.  “At any rate I admire Benham.  I have the advantage of him there.”  The quickness of his wit made her smile.  “But, as you say, we are different,” he added after a moment.  “I reckon I’ve turned my hand at times to jobs of which Benham would disapprove; but I’d be hanged before I’d write the greatest document ever penned in—­well, in the blood of one of those squirrels out yonder in the Square!”

As he finished he turned his face toward the window, and following his gaze, she saw the sunlight sparkling like amber wine on the rich grass and the delicate green of the trees.  As she looked back at him, she wondered what his past could have been—­how deep, how complex, how varied was his experience of life?  She was aware again of that curiously primitive attraction which she had felt the other afternoon in the shop.  It was as if he appealed, not to the beliefs and sentiments with which life had obscured and muffled her nature, but to some buried self beneath the self that she and the world knew, to some ancient instinct which was as deep as the oldest forests of earth.  After all, was there a hidden self, a buried forest within her soul which she had never discovered?

“But Patty has not given you her message!” she exclaimed, startled and confused by the strangeness of the sensation.

“Oh, there isn’t much to tell,” answered Patty, wondering if she could ever learn, even if she practised every day, to speak and move like Corinna.  “It was only that you ought to stand by your friends.”

“To stand by my friends,” repeated Vetch; then he drew in his breath with a whistling sound.  “Well, I like his impudence!” he exclaimed.

Corinna rose with a laugh.  “So do I,” she observed, “and he seems to possess it in abundance.”  Then she folded Patty in a light and fragrant embrace.  “You must be the belle of the ball,” she said.  “I have a genius for being a chaperon.”

When she had gone, and they watched her car pass the monument, the girl turned back into the hall, with her hand clinging tightly to Vetch’s arm.