that there was some pathos in that careful wish to avoid suffering formed by one so young, who had already borne an unhappy girlhood with a mother who drugged and a stepfather who dared not show his affection for her for fear of his wife’s jealousy.  The kind, weak little man had died and left her a few hundreds a year; she was always grateful to him for that, and forgave him for not standing between her and her mother as he might have done.  Those hundreds had saved her from any question of taking money from Killigrew.  Her poems would not have kept her—­that she knew.  Also she had never done as well as in that first slim book when she had known nothing of life at all.  Real experience had bitten too deep for transmission to paper.

When he came back from Paris, a year after the time at Cloom, he had written to her and she had met him.  Then it had all come out—­all about her wretched home and her mother—­and they had met again and again.  Killigrew could not bear the thought of suffering, and he had tried to make up to her by taking her out as much as he could—­not alone, for that was impossible in those days, but always with such others as merely formed a pleasant negative background.  Between them from the first of those days in London was a consciousness of being man and woman there had not been for her at Cloom, though he now told her she had always disturbed him, that there was for him a something profoundly troubling in her slim sexless body, her burning mind, her quaint little sureness of poise which never let her lose her sense of proportion.  That had so appealed to him ... never from her had he heard the talk of women, that love was the greatest thing in the world, or that any one person could matter more than all the many other things put together.  She had thought with him that life was far otherwise—­made up of many things, a pattern....  And yet it was she who, though in theory keeping all those ideas, had lived and suffered only for the one thing, had her horizon narrowed to his figure.  All the time she told herself it was a distorted view, but that did not prevent her suffering; it only enabled her to be aware that it mattered very little whether she suffered or not.

They had gone on meeting, and soon it was a recognised thing that he should kiss her who had never even let herself so much as be kissed at a dance.  But this was different, she told herself—­he kissed her so kindly.  His kisses altered, but still she bore them, dimly aware of portent in them, but trying, with a woman’s guile, to laugh them off by seeming to keep a child’s uncomprehension of what they meant.  Then she had had a bad time to undergo during her mother’s lingering illness and death, before she could take her freedom.  Her mother left her nothing, but she had the kind little man’s small income.  She had been worn out by the time everything was over; and owing to her mother’s complaint, which had made it impossible to have visitors at the house, and to her jealousy, which had prevented Judy making many friends for herself outside, she knew no one with whom she was intimate enough to ask for advice and help.  Killigrew had taken charge of her and been goodness itself.