“Pray may I come in?” he called from behind the portiere.

Hilda, who sat with her back to it, smiled in enjoying recognition of the thin, high academic note, the prim finish of the inflection.  It reminded her of a man she knew who “did” curates beautifully.

Arnold walked past her with his quick, humble, clerical gait, and it amused her to think that he bent over Alicia’s hand as if he would bless it.

“You can’t guess how badly I want a cup of coffee.”  He flavoured what he said, and made it pretty, like a woman.  “Let me confess at once, that is what brought me.”  He stopped to laugh; there was a hint of formality and self-sacrifice even in that.  “It is coffee-time, isn’t it?” Then he turned and saw Hilda, and she was, at the moment, flushed with the luxury of her sensations, a vision as splendid as she must have been to him unusual.  But he only closed his lips and thrust his chin out a little, with his left hand behind him in one of his intensely clerical attitudes, and so stood waiting.  Hilda reflected afterwards that she could hardly have expected him to exclaim, “Whom have we here?” with upraised hands, but she had to acknowledge her flash of surprise at his self-possession.  She noted, too, his grave bow when Alicia mentioned them to each other, that there was the habit of deference in it, yet that it waved her courteously, so to speak, out of his life.  It was all as interesting as the materialisation of a quaint tradition, and she decided not, after all, to begin a trivial comedy for herself and Alicia, by asking the Reverend Stephen Arnold whether he objected to tobacco.  She had an instant’s circling choice of the person she would represent to this priest in the little intermingling half-hour of their lives that lay shaken out before them, and dropped unerringly.  It really hardly mattered, but she always had such instants.  She was aware of the shadow of a regret at the opulence of her personal effect; her hand went to her throat and drew the laces closer together there.  An erectness stole into her body as she sat, and a look into her eyes that divorced her at a stroke from anything that could have spoken to him of too general an accessibility, too unthinking a largesse.  She went on smoking, but almost immediately her cigarette took its proper note of insignificance.  Alicia, speaking of it once afterwards to Arnold, found that he had forgotten it.

“Even in College Street you have heard of Miss Howe,” Alicia said, and the negative, very readable in Arnold’s silent bow, brought Hilda a flicker of happiness at her hostess’s expense.

“I don’t think the posters carry us as far as College Street,” she said, “but I am not difficult to explain, Mr. Arnold.  I act with Mr. Stanhope’s Company.  If you lived in Chowringhee you couldn’t help knowing all about me, the letters are so large.”  The bounty of her well-spring of kindness was in it under the candour and the simplicity; it was one of those least of little things which are enough.