A simple enough question!  A proposal felicitous enough!  Dore was becoming known even in the Five Towns, not, assuredly, by his illustrations to the Contes Drolatiques of Balzac—­but by his shuddering Biblical conceits.  In pious circles Dore was saving art from the reproach of futility and frivolity.  It was indubitably a tasteful idea on Gerald’s part to take his love of a summer’s afternoon to gaze at the originals of those prints which had so deeply impressed the Five Towns.  It was an idea that sanctified the profane adventure.

Yet Sophia showed signs of affliction.  Her colour went and came; her throat made the motion of swallowing; there was a muscular contraction over her whole body.  And she drew herself from him.  Her glance, however, did not leave him, and his eyes fell before hers.

“But what about the—­wedding?” she breathed.

That sentence seemed to cost all her pride; but she was obliged to utter it, and to pay for it.

“Oh,” he said lightly and quickly, just as though she had reminded him of a detail that might have been forgotten, “I was just going to tell you.  It can’t be done here.  There’s been some change in the rules.  I only found out for certain late last night.  But I’ve ascertained that it’ll be as simple as ABC before the English Consul at Paris; and as I’ve got the tickets for us to go over to-night, as we arranged ...”  He stopped.

She sat down on the towel-covered chair, staggered.  She believed what he said.  She did not suspect that he was using the classic device of the seducer.  It was his casualness that staggered her.  Had it really been his intention to set off on an excursion and remark as an afterthought:  “By the way, we can’t be married as I told you at half-past two to-day”?  Despite her extreme ignorance and innocence, Sophia held a high opinion of her own commonsense and capacity for looking after herself, and she could scarcely believe that he was expecting her to go to Paris, and at night, without being married.  She looked pitiably young, virgin, raw, unsophisticated; helpless in the midst of dreadful dangers.  Yet her head was full of a blank astonishment at being mistaken for a simpleton!  The sole explanation could be that Gerald, in some matters, must himself be a confiding simpleton.  He had not reflected.  He had not sufficiently realized the immensity of her sacrifice in flying with him even to London.  She felt sorry for him.  She had the woman’s first glimpse of the necessity for some adjustment of outlook as an essential preliminary to uninterrupted happiness.

“It’ll be all right!” Gerald persuasively continued.

He looked at her, as she was not looking at him.  She was nineteen.  But she seemed to him utterly mature and mysterious.  Her face baffled him; her mind was a foreign land.  Helpless in one sense she might be; yet she, and not he, stood for destiny; the future lay in the secret and capricious workings of that mind.