He said, “I’m right sorry for you, Miss Melville.  But you know ...  We all have our troubles.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“I wanted to go into the Navy.”

“You did?  Would your father not let you?” She said it in her red-headed “My-word-if-I’d-been-there” way.

“Aye, he would have liked it fine.”

“What was it then?” She leaned forward and almost crooned at him.  “What was it then?”

His speech became more clipped.  “My eyes.”

“Your eyes!” she breathed.  He suddenly became a person to her.  “I never thought.”

“I’m as short-sighted as a bat.”

“They look all right.”  She frowned at them as though they were traitors.

He basked in her pity.  “They’re not.  I never could play football at the University.”

She rose and stood beside him at the table, so that he would feel how sorry she was, and set one finger to her lips and murmured, “Well, well!” and at the end of a warm, drowsy moment, after which they seemed to know each other much better, she said softly and irrelevantly, “I saw you capped.”

“Did you so?  How did you notice me?  It was one of the big graduations.”

“I went with my mother to see my cousin Jeanie capped M.A., and we saw your name on the list.  Philip Mactavish James.  And mother said, ’Yon’ll be the son of Mactavish James.  Many’s the time I’ve danced with him when I was Ellen Forbes.’  Funny to think of them dancing!”

“Oh, father was a great man for the ladies.”  They both laughed.  He vacillated from the emotional business of the moment.  “Do you dance?” he asked.

“I did at school—­”

“Don’t you go to dances?”

She shook her head.  It was a shame, thought Mr. Philip.

With that long slender waist she should have danced so beautifully; he could imagine how her head would droop back and show her throat, how her brows would become grave with great pleasure.  He wished she could come to his mother’s dances, but he knew so well the rigid standards of his own bourgeoisie that he felt displeased by his wish.  It was impossible to ask a Miss Melville to a dance unless one could say, ’She’s the daughter of old Mr. Melville in Moray Place.  Do you not mind Melville, the wine merchant?’ and specially impossible to ask this Miss Melville unless one had some such certificate to attach to her vividness.  But he wished he could dance with her.

Ellen recalled him to the business of pity.  She had thought of dances for no more than a minute, though it had long been one of her dreams to enter a ballroom by a marble staircase (which she imagined of a size and steepness really more suited to a water-chute), carrying a black ostrich-feather fan such as she had seen Sarah Bernhardt pythoning about with in “La Dame aux Camelias.”  This hour she had dedicated to Mr. Philip, and he knew it.  She was thinking of him with an intentness which was associated with