to her, for all her theories, that she should be looking her best when she got up in the morning than was justifiable from any point of view except the biological.  She had no heroic quarrel with these conditions—­her experience had not been upon that plane—­but she bemoaned them with sincerity as too fundamental, too all pervading; one came upon them at every turn, grinning in their pretty chains.  It was absurd, she construed, that a world of mankind and woman kind with vastly interesting possibilities should be so essentially subjected.  So primitive, it was, she argued in her vivid candour, and so interfering—­so horribly interfering!  Personally she did not see herself one of the fugitive half of the race; she had her defences; but the necessity of using them was matter for complaint when existence might have been so delightful a boon without it, full of affinities and communities in every direction.  She had not, I am convinced, any of the notions of a crusader upon this popular subject, nor may I portray her either shocked or revolted, only rather bored, being a creature whom it was unkind to hamper; and she would have explained quite in these simple terms the reason why Stephen Arnold’s saving neutrality of temperament was to her a pervasive charm of his society.

She had not yet felt at liberty to tell him that she could not classify him, that she had never known anyone like him before; and there was in this no doubt a vague perception that the confession showed a limitation of experience on her part for which he might be inclined to call her to account; since cultured young Oxonians with an altruistic bias, if they do not exactly abound, are still often enough to be discovered if one happens to belong to the sphere which they haunt, they and their ideals.  Not that any such consideration led her to gloss or to minimise the disabilities of her own.  She sat sometimes in gravest wonder, pinching her lips, and watched the studiously modified interest of his glance following her into its queer byways—­her sphere’s—­full of spangles and limelight, and the first-class hysteria of third-class rival artistry.  There was a fascination in bringing him out of his remoteness near to those things, a speculation worth making as to what he might do.  This remained ungratified, for he never did anything.  He only let it appear by the most indefinite signs possible, that he saw what she saw, peering over his paling, and she in the picturesque tangle outside found it enough.

He was there when she came back from the Chronicle office, patient under the blue umbrellas; he had brought her a book, and they had told him she would not be long in returning.  He had gone so far as to order tea for her, and it was waiting with him.  “Make it,” she commanded; “why haven’t you had some already?” and while he bent over the battered Britannia metal spout she sank into the nearest seat and let her hat make a frame for her face against the back of it.  She was too tired, she said, to move, and her hands lay extended, one upon each arm of her chair, with the air of being left there to be picked up at her convenience.  Arnold, over the teapot, agreed that walking in Calcutta was an insidious pleasure—­ one gathered a lassitude—­and brought her cup.  She looked at him for an instant as she took it.