‘That sounds very pessimist.’

‘More duels come from politics than from any other source.’

‘I fear it is true.  Then women might set you an example.’

‘By avoiding it?’

‘I think you have been out of England for some time.’

‘I have been in America.’

‘We are not exactly on the pattern of the Americans.’  Philip hinted a bow.  He praised the Republican people.

‘Yes, but in our own way we are working out our own problems over here,’ said she.  ’We have infinitely more to contend with:  old institutions, monstrous prejudices, and a slower-minded people, I dare say:  much slower, I admit.  We are not shining to advantage at present.  Still, that is not the fault of English women.’

‘Are they so spirited?’

Spirited was hardly the word Miss Mattock would have chosen to designate the spirit in them.  She hummed a second or two, deliberating; it flashed through her during the pause that he had been guilty of irony, and she reddened:  and remembering a foregoing strange sensation she reddened more.  She had been in her girlhood a martyr to this malady of youth; it had tied her to the stake and enveloped her in flames for no accountable reason, causing her to suffer cruelly and feel humiliated.  She knew the pangs of it in public, and in private as well.  And she had not conquered it yet.  She was angered to find herself such a merely physical victim of the rushing blood:  which condition of her senses did not immediately restore her natural colour.

‘They mean nobly,’ she said, to fill an extending gap in the conversation under a blush; and conscious of an ultra-swollen phrase, she snatched at it nervously to correct it:  ’They are becoming alive to the necessity for action.’  But she was talking to a soldier!  ’I mean, their heads are opening.’  It sounded ludicrous.  ’They are educating themselves differently.’  Were they?  ’They wish to take their part in the work of the world.’  That was nearer the proper tone, though it had a ring of claptrap rhetoric hateful to her:  she had read it and shrunk from it in reports of otherwise laudable meetings.

’Well, spirited, yes.  I think they are.  I believe they are.  One has need to hope so.’

Philip offered a polite affirmative, evidently formal.

Not a sign had he shown of noticing her state of scarlet.  His grave liquid eyes were unalterable.  She might have been grateful, but the reflection that she had made a step to unlock the antechamber of her dearest deepest matters to an ordinary military officer, whose notions of women were probably those of his professional brethren, impelled her to transfer his polished decorousness to the burden of his masculine antagonism-plainly visible.  She brought the dialogue to a close.  Colonel Adister sidled an eye at a three-quarter view of her face.  ‘I fancy you’re feeling the heat of the room,’ he said.