“Are you a severe person?” she asked, coming forward to him.  “Ought people to be afraid of you?”

“Yes, people with bad consciences.  I’m rattier afraid of myself for that reason.”

“Have you got a bad conscience?” she asked, letting her eyes rest on his.

“Yes.  I can’t make my conduct square with my ideal of conduct.”

“I know what that is!” she sighed.  “Do you expect to be punished for it?”

“I expect to be got even with.”

“Yes, one is.  I’ve noticed that myself.  But I didn’t suppose that actors—­Oh, I forgot!  I beg your pardon again, Mr. Verrian.  Oh—­Goodnight!” She faced him evanescently in going out, with the woman after her, but, whether she did so more in fear or more in defiance, she left him standing motionless in his doubt, and she did nothing to solve his doubt when she came quickly back alone, before he was aware of having moved, to say, “Mr. Verrian, I want to—­I have to—­tell you that —­I didn’t think you were the actor.”  Then she was finally gone, and Verrian had nothing for it but to go up to his room with the book he found he had in his hand and must have had there all the time.

If he had read it, the book would not have eased him off to sleep, but he did not even try, to read it.  He had no wish to sleep.  The waking dream in which he lost himself was more interesting than any vision of slumber could have been, and he had no desire to end it.  In that he could still be talking with the girl whose mystery appealed to him so pleasingly.  It was none the less pleasing because, at what might be called her first blushes, she did not strike him as altogether ingenuous, but only able to discipline herself into a final sincerity from a consciousness which had been taught wisdom by experience.

She was still a scarcely recovered invalid, and it was pathetic that she should be commencing the struggle of life with strength so little proportioned to the demand upon it; and the calling she had taken up was of a fantasticality in some aspects which was equally pathetic.  But all the undertakings of women, he mused, were piteous, not only because women were unequal to the struggle at the best, but because they were hampered always with themselves, with their sex, their femininity, and the necessity of getting it out of the way before they could really begin to fight.  Whatever they attempted it must be in relation to the man’s world in which livings were made; but the immemorial conditions were almost wholly unchanged.  A woman approached this world as a woman, with the inborn instinct of tempting it as a woman, to win it to love her and make her a wife and mother; and although she might stoically overcome the temptation at last, it might recur at any moment and overcome her.  This was perpetually weakening and imperilling her, and she must feel it at the encounter with each man she met.  She must feel the tacit and even unconscious irony of his attitude towards her in her enterprise, and the finer her make the crueller and the more humiliating and disheartening this must be.