“I have seen her twice.  She was in here the other day to look at my prints, and,” her brilliant eyes grew soft, “well, I feel sorry for her.”

“Sorry?  But do you like her?”

“Haven’t you always told me that I like everybody?”

He laughed.  “With one exception!”

“With one particular exception!”

“But honestly, Corinna.”  His tone was insistent.  “Do you like Patty Vetch?”

“Honestly, my dear Stephen, I do.  There is something—­well, something almost pathetic about the girl; and I think she is genuine.  One day last week she came here and made me tell her everything I could about my prints.  I don’t mean really that she made me, you know.  There wasn’t anything forward about her then, though I hear there is sometimes.  She seemed to me a restless, lonely, misdirected intelligence hungry to know things.  That is the only way I can describe her, but you will understand.  She has had absolutely no advantages; she doesn’t even know what culture means, or social instinct, or any of the qualities you were born with, my dear boy; but she feels vaguely that she has missed something, and she is reaching out gropingly and trying to find it.  I like the spirit.  It strikes me as American in the best sense—­that young longing to make up in some way for her deficiencies and lack of opportunities, that gallant determination to get the better of her upbringing and her surroundings.  A fight always appeals to me, you know.  I like the courage that is in the girl—­I am sure it is courage—­and her straightforward effort to get the best out of life, to learn the things she was never taught, to make herself over if need be.”

“Is this Patty Vetch, Corinna, or your own dramatic instinct?”

“Oh, it’s Patty Vetch!  I had no interest in her whatever.  Why should I have had?  But I liked the way she went straight as a dart at the thing she wanted.  There was no affectation about her, no pretence of being what she was not.  She asked about prints because she saw the name and she didn’t know what it meant.  She would have asked about Browning, or Swinburne, or Meredith in exactly the same way if this had been a book-shop.  She wanted to know the difference between a mezzotint and a stipple print.  She wanted to know all about the portraits too, and the names of the painters and who Lady Hamilton was and the Duchess of Bedford and the Ladies Waldegrave and ‘Serena,’ and if Morland’s Cottagers were really as happy as they were painted?  She asked as many questions as Socrates, and I fear got as inadequately answered.”

“Well, she didn’t strike me as in the least like that; but you can be a great help to her if she is really in earnest.”

“She didn’t strike you like that, my dear, simply because you are a man, and some girls are never really themselves with men; they are for ever acting a part; a vulgar part, I admit, but one they have learned before they were born, the instinctive quarry eluding the instinctive hunter.  The girl is naturally shy; I could tell that, and she covers it with a kind of boldness that isn’t—­well, particularly attractive to one of your fastidious mind.  Yet there is something rather taking about her.  She reminds me of a small, bright tropical bird.”