Nigel made the mistake of judging Mrs. Chepstow’s capacity by the measure of his own shrewdness, which in such a direction was not great.  What seemed the inevitable procedure of such a woman to Nigel’s amount of worldly cleverness, seemed the procedure to be avoided to Mrs. Chepstow’s amount of the same blessing.  She seldom took the obvious route in deception, as Isaacson had realized almost from the first moment when he knew her.  She paid people the compliment of crediting them with astuteness, and thought it advisable to be not only more clever than they were stupid, but more clever than they were clever.

And so Nigel’s pity grew; and now, when he was “having it out” with himself, he felt that when the season was over Mrs. Chepstow must miss him, not because she had picked him out as a man specially attractive to her, but simply because he had brought the human element into a very lonely life.  In their last conversation he had spoken of the end of the season, of the exodus that would follow it.

“Oh—­yes, of course,” she had said, rather vaguely.

“Where are you going?”

She had sat for a moment in silence, and he had believed he followed the movement of her thought.  He had felt certain that she was considering whether she would tell him a lie, recount some happy plan invented at the moment to deceive him.  Feeling this certainty, he had looked at her, and his eyes had asked her to tell him the truth.  And he had believed that she yielded to them, when at length she said: 

“I haven’t any special plans.  I dare say I shall stay on quietly here.”

She had not given him an opportunity of making a rejoinder, but had at once turned the conversation to some quite different topic.  And again he had divined pride working busily within her.

She must miss him.

She must miss any one who occasionally stepped in to break her solitude.  Sometimes he had wondered at this solitude’s completeness.  He wondered again now.  Everybody had their friends, their intimates, whether delightful or preposterous.  Who were hers?  Of course the average woman had “dropped” her long ago.  But there are other women in London besides the average woman.  There are brilliant women of Bohemia, there are clever women even belonging to society who “take their own way,” and know precisely whom they choose, whoever interests or attracts them.  And—­there are friends, faithful through changes, misfortunes, even disasters.  Where were Mrs. Chepstow’s?  He did not dare to ask.

He recalled his first visit to her, not with any maudlin sentimentality, but with a quiet earnestness:  the empty room looking to the river, the open piano and the music upon it, the few roses, and the books.  He recalled “The Scarlet Letter” bound in white, and her partial quotation from the Bible in explanation of its binding.  Abruptly she had stopped, perhaps suddenly conscious of the application to herself.  At tea she had said of the cakes that were so good, “I ordered them specially for you and our little festivity.”  There was a great simplicity in the words, and in her voice when she had said them.  In her loneliness, a cup of tea drunk with him was a “festivity.”  He imagined her sitting alone in that room in August, when the town is parched, dried up, and half deserted.  How would she pass her days?