“Oh, you dear absurd thing!” he cried, feeling intensely moved.  “Haven’t you the least idea how far beyond price you are, how worthless I am!  Anyway ...  I’ve no people, except my mother.”  He paused and wondered if he would tell her about his mother now; but seeing that her brows were still knitted by her private trouble about their marriage, the nature of which he could not guess, he thought he would not do it just now.  In any case, he did not want to.  “And she will know how lucky I am to get you, how little I deserve you.”

“I’d have married you,” said Ellen, not without bitterness, “if you’d been an anti-Suffragist.”  The situation was so plainly presenting itself to her as being in some way dreadful that he anxiously held her with his eyes.  She stammered, folding and refolding her hands.  “It’ll be queer, living in a house with you, won’t it?”

He had held her eyes, and thus forced her to tell him what was troubling her, on the assumption that he could deal with her answer.  But this was outside his experience.  He did not know anything about girls; he had hardly believed in the positive reality of girlhood; it had seemed to him rather a negative thing, the state of not being a woman.  But in the light of her gentle, palpitant distress, he saw that it was indeed so real a state that passing from it to the state of womanhood would be as terrible as if she had to give birth to herself....  It was such a helpless state, too.  She was, he said to himself again—­for he knew she did not like him to say it!—­such a little thing.  He remembered, with a sudden sweat of horror, the conversation in the lawyer’s office that had sent him sweating up here, keeping himself so hot with curses at the human world that he had not felt the coldness of the weather.  God, how he had hated that office from the moment he set foot in it!  He had hated Mr. Mactavish James at sight as much as he had hated his young son; for the solicitor had surveyed him with that lewd look that old men sometimes give to strong young men.  He had perceived at once, from the way Mr. James was sucking the occasion, that he had been sent for some special purpose, and he did not believe, from the repetition of that lewd look, that it related to his property in Rio or that it was clean.  He was prepared for the drawled comment, “I hear ye’re making fren’s wi’ our wee Nelly,” and he was ready with a hard stare.  It was enraging to see that the old man had expected his haughtiness and that it was evidently fuel for his lewd jest.  “I am fond of wee Nelly.  She’s just a world’s wonder.  You sit there saying nothing, maybe it doesn’t interest you, but you would feel as I do if you had seen her the way I did thon day a year ago in June.  Ay!” He threw his eyes up and exclaimed succulently, “The wee bairn!” with an air of giving a handsome present.