“Here you are,” she said, “you put your name there.”  She bent over him as he wrote and wished she could put something on the form to show how magnificent he was and what a catch she had made for the movement.

Well, there was no possible excuse for staying any longer, and the poor old lady was yawning behind her knitting.  He rose and said good-bye, wondering as he spoke how he could make his entrance here again and how he could break it to these women, who were like hardy secular nuns, that he came for love.  If this had been a Spanish or a Cariocan mother and daughter how easy it would have been!  The elder woman’s eyes would have crackled brightly among her wrinkles and she would have looked at her daughter with the air of genial treachery which old women wear when they contrive a young girl’s marriage, and she would have dropped some subtle hint at the next convenient assignation; and the girl herself would have stood by like a dark living scythe in the Latin attitude of modesty, very straight from the waist to the feet, but the shoulders bent as if to hide the bosom and the head bowed, mysteriously intimating that she knew nothing and yet could promise to submit to everything.  But here was Mrs. Melville saying something quite vague about hoping that he would drop in if he was passing, and Ellen lifting to him a stubborn face that warned him there would be a thousand resistances to overcome before she would own herself a being accessible to passion.  Yet this harsh inexpertness about life was the essence that made these people delightful to him.  It was unreasonable, but it was true, that he adored them because they were difficult.

“Ellen, run out and light the hall gas for Mr. Yaverland.”  And from the courtesy in the tone and something gracious in Ellen’s obedience he saw that they were too poor to keep the gas burning in the hall all the evening, and so the lighting of it ranked as a ceremonial for an honoured guest.  They were dear people.

As he buttoned his oilskins to the chin while Ellen stood ready to open the front door he did not dare look at her because his stare would have been so fixed and bright.  He set his eyes instead on the engravings, which for the most part represented Robert Burns as the Scotch like to picture their national poet, with hair sleek and slightly waved like the coat of a retriever hanging round a face oval and blank and sweet like a tea-biscuit.

“You seem to admire Burns,” he said.

“Me?  No, indeed.  Those are my grandmother’s pictures.  I think nothing of the man.  His intellectual content was miserably small.”

“That’s a proposition he never butted up against—­”

“What?”

“A woman who said that his intellectual content was miserably small.  You’re one of Time’s revenges....”