He had reached the age of thirty without ever having been in love, leading a life of almost savage purity, with one solitary breakdown.  Women were afraid of him.  And he was perhaps a little afraid of woman.  She was in theory too lovely and desirable—­the half-moon in a summer sky; in practice too cloying, or too harsh.  He had an affection for Barbara, his younger sister; but to his mother, his grandmother, or his elder sister Agatha, he had never felt close.  It was indeed amusing to see Lady Valleys with her first-born.  Her fine figure, the blown roses of her face, her grey-blue eyes which had a slight tendency to roll, as though amusement just touched with naughtiness bubbled behind them; were reduced to a queer, satirical decorum in Miltoun’s presence.  Thoughts and sayings verging on the risky were characteristic of her robust physique, of her soul which could afford to express almost all that occurred to it.  Miltoun had never, not even as a child, given her his confidence.  She bore him no resentment, being of that large, generous build in body and mind, rarely—­never in her class—­associated with the capacity for feeling aggrieved or lowered in any estimation, even its own.  He was, and always had been, an odd boy, and there was an end of it!  Nothing had perhaps so disconcerted Lady Valleys as his want of behaviour in regard to women.  She felt it abnormal, just as she recognized the essential if duly veiled normality of her husband and younger son.  It was this feeling which made her realize almost more vividly than she had time for, in the whirl of politics and fashion, the danger of his friendship with this lady to whom she alluded so discreetly as ‘Anonyma.’

Pure chance had been responsible for the inception of that friendship.  Going one December afternoon to the farmhouse of a tenant, just killed by a fall from his horse, Miltoun had found the widow in a state of bewildered grief, thinly cloaked in the manner of one who had almost lost the power to express her feelings, and quite lost it in presence of ’the gentry.’  Having assured the poor soul that she need have no fear about her tenancy, he was just leaving, when he met, in the stone-flagged entrance, a lady in a fur cap and jacket, carrying in her arms a little crying boy, bleeding from a cut on the forehead.  Taking him from her and placing him on a table in the parlour, Miltoun looked at this lady, and saw that she was extremely grave, and soft, and charming.  He inquired of her whether the mother should be told.

She shook her head.

“Poor thing, not just now:  let’s wash it, and bind it up first.”

Together therefore they washed and bound up the cut.  Having finished, she looked at Miltoun, and seemed to say:  “You would do the telling so much better than I.”

He, therefore, told the mother and was rewarded by a little smile from the grave lady.