“You made a vivid impression here last year,” said Alicia.  She felt delightfully terse and to the point.

“You mean Mr. Lindsay.  Mr. Lindsay is very impressionable.  Do you know him well?”

Alicia closed her lips, and a faint line graved itself on each side of them.  Her whole face sounded a retreat, and her eyes were cold—­it would have annoyed her to know how cold—­with distance.

“He is an old friend of my brother’s,” she said.  Hilda had the sensation of coming unexpectedly, through the lightest loam, upon a hard surface.  She looked attentively at the red heart of her cigarette, crisped over with grey, in its blackened calyx.

“Most impressionable,” she went on, as if Alicia had not spoken.  “As to the rest of the people—­bah, you can’t rouse Calcutta.  It is sunk in its torpid liver, and imagines itself superior.  It’s really funny, you know, the way pancreatic influences can be idealised—­made to serve ennobling ends.  But Mr. Lindsay is—­different.”

“Yes?” Miss Livingstone’s intention was neutral, but, in spite of her, the asking note was in the word.

“We have done some interesting things together here.  He has shown me the queerest places.  Yesterday he made me go with him to Wellesley Square to look at his latest enthusiasm standing in the middle of it.”

“A statue?”

“No, a woman, preaching and warbling to the people.  She wasn’t new to me—­I knew her before he did—­but the picture was and the performance.  She stood poised on a coolie’s basket in the midst of a rabble of all colours, like a fallen angel—­I mean a dropped one.  Light seemed to come from her hair or eyes or something.  I almost expected to see her sail away over the palms into the sunset when it was ended.”

“It sounds most unusual,” Alicia said, with a light smile.  Her interest was rather obviously curbed.

“It happens every day, really, only one doesn’t stop and look; one doesn’t go round the corner.”

There was another little silence, full of the unwillingness of Miss Livingstone’s desire to be informed.

Hilda knocked the ash of her cigarette into her finger bowl and waited.  The pause grew so stiff with embarrassment that she broke it herself.

“And I regret to say it was I who introduced them,” she said.

“Introduced whom?”

“Mr. Lindsay and Miss Laura Filbert of the Salvation Army.  They met at Number Three; she had come after my soul.  I think she was disappointed,” Hilda went on tranquilly, “because I would only lend it to her while she was there.”

“Of the Salvation Army!  I can’t imagine why you should regret it.  He is always grateful to be amused.”

“Oh, there is no reason to doubt his gratitude.  He is rather intense about it.  And—­I don’t know that my regret is precisely on Mr. Lindsay’s account.  Did I say so?” They were simple, amiable words, and their pertinence was far from insistent:  but Alicia’s crude blush—­everything else about her was perfectly worked out—­cried aloud that it was too sharp a pull up.  “Perhaps, though,” Hilda hurried on with a pang, “we generalise too much about the men.”