“Yes!  Amusing, isn’t it?  But you, I think, don’t trouble much about such questions.”

“It seems to me waste of time.”

She was thinking of Dyce Lashmar, asking herself whether she would meet him, or not, to-morrow morning.  Certainly she wished to do so.  Lashmar at a distance left her coolly reasonable; she wanted to recover the emotional state of mind which had come about during their stolen interview.  With Lord Dymchurch, though his attentions were flattering, she could not for a moment imagine herself touched by romantic feeling.

“So it is,” he was saying.  “To waste time in that way has always been one of my bad habits.  But I am going to get rid of it.”

He seemed on the point of adding more significant words.  May heard the sound fail in his throat; saw without looking at him—­his sudden embarrassment.  When the words came, as surely they would, what was to be her answer?  She hoped for inspiration.  Why should it be necessary for her to make precise reply?  No!  She would not.  Freedom and the exercise of power were what she wanted.  Enough to promise her answer a month, or half a year, hence.  If the old lady didn’t like it, let her learn patience.

Dymchurch sat bending forward.  The dry leaf crackled between his fingers; he was crushing it to powder.

“Who,” he asked, “is the lady Miss Bride was speaking of, in connection with the servant’s training-school?”

“Mrs. Gallantry.  A good, active sort of woman at Hollingford.”

“That scheme doesn’t interest you much?”

“Not very much, I confess.  I quite approve of it.  It’s just the kind of thing for people like Miss Bride, plodding and practical; no doubt they’ll make it very useful.  But I have rather lost my keenness for work of that sort.  Perhaps I have grown out of it.  Of course I wish as much as ever for the good of the lower classes, but I feel that my own work will lie in another direction.”

“Tell me what you have in mind,” said Dymchurch, meeting her look with soft eyes.

“What I really care about now is the spirit of the educated class.  There’s such a great deal to be done among people of our own kind.  Not of course by direct teaching and preaching, but by personal influence, exercised in all sorts of ways.  I should like to set the intellectual tone in my own circle.  I should like my house to—­as it were, to radiate light.”

The listener could not but smile.  Yet his amusement had no tincture of irony.  He himself would not have used these phrases, but was not the thought exactly what he had in mind?  He, too, felt his inaptitude for the ordinary forms of “social” usefulness; in his desire and his resolve to “do something,” he had been imagining just this sort of endeavour, and May’s words seemed to make it less vague.

“I quite understand you,” he exclaimed, with some fervour.  “There’s plenty of scope for that sort of influence.  You would do your best to oppose the tendencies of vulgar and selfish society.  If only in a little circle one could set the fashion of thought, of living for things that are worth while!  And I see no impossibility.  It has been done before now.”