“Of course I liked it.”

“So did I,” he answered joyously, “I quite enjoyed it.  We’ll do it again some other night.”

“What made you come, like that?” said she, appeased by his innocence.

“I couldn’t help it.  You looked so pretty, dear, and so forlorn.  It seemed brutal, somehow, to abandon you on the weary road to heaven.”

She sighed.  That was his chivalry again.  He would escort her politely to the door of heaven, but would he ever go in with her, would he ever stay there?

Still, it was something that he should have gone with her so far.  It gave her confidence and an idea of what her power might come to be.  Not that she relied upon herself alone.  Her plan for Majendie’s salvation was liberal and large, it admitted of other methods, other influences.  There was no narrowness, any more than there was jealousy, in Anne.

“Walter,” said she, “I want you to know Mrs. Eliott.”

“But I do know her, don’t I?”

He called up a vision of the lady whose house had been Anne’s home in Scale.  He was grateful to Mrs. Eliott.  But for her slender acquaintance with his sister, he would never have known Anne.  This made him feel that he knew Mrs. Eliott.

“But I want you to know her as I know her.”

He laughed.  “Is that possible?  Does a man ever know a woman as another woman knows her?”

Anne felt that she was not only being diverted from her purpose, but led by a side tract to an unexplored profundity.  On the further side of it she discerned, dimly, the undesirable.  It was a murky region, haunted by still murkier presences, by Lady Cayley and her kind.  She persisted with a magnificent irrelevance.

“You must know her.  You would like her.”

He didn’t in the least want to know Mrs. Eliott, he didn’t think that he would like her.  But he was soothed, flattered, insanely pleased with Anne’s assumption that he would.  It was as if in her thoughts she were drawing him towards her.  He felt that she was softening, yielding.  His approaches were a delicious wooing of an unfamiliar, unwedded Anne.

“I would like her, because you like her, is that it?”

“It wouldn’t follow.”

“Oh, how you spoil it!”

“Spoil what?”

“My inference.  It pleased me.  But, as you say, the logic wasn’t sound.”

Silence being the only dignified course under mystification, Anne was silent.  Some men had that irritating way with women; Walter’s smile suggested that he might have it.  She was not going to minister to his male delight.  Unfortunately her silence seemed to please him too.

“Never mind, dear, I do like her; because she likes you.”

“You will like her for herself when you know her.”

“Will she like me for myself when she knows me?  It’s extremely doubtful.  You see, hitherto she has made no ardent sign.”

“My dear, she says you’ve never been near her.  You’ve never come to one of her Thursdays.”