I had no business to be,
in his own garden, when he suddenly came upon me, an ignorant girl of
seventeen, a most uninviting creature with a tousled head, in an old
black frock and shabby boots. I could have run away. I was perfectly
capable of it. But I stayed looking up at him and--in the end it was HE
who went away and it was I who stayed."

"Consciously?" I murmured.

"Consciously? You may just as well ask my shadow that lay so still by me
on the young grass in that morning sunshine. I never knew before how
still I could keep. It wasn't the stillness of terror. I remained,
knowing perfectly well that if I ran he was not the man to run after me.
I remember perfectly his deep-toned, politely indifferent '_Restez
donc_.' He was mistaken. Already then I hadn't the slightest intention
to move. And if you ask me again how far conscious all this was the
nearest answer I can make you is this: that I remained on purpose, but I
didn't know for what purpose I remained. Really, that couldn't be
expected. . . . Why do you sigh like this? Would you have preferred me
to be idiotically innocent or abominably wise?"

"These are not the questions that trouble me," I said. "If I sighed it
is because I am weary."

"And getting stiff, too, I should say, in this Pompeiian armchair. You
had better get out of it and sit on this couch as you always used to do.
That, at any rate, is not Pompeiian. You have been growing of late
extremely formal, I don't know why. If it is a pose then for goodness'
sake drop it. Are you going to model yourself on Captain Blunt? You
couldn't, you know. You are too young."

"I don't want to model myself on anybody," I said. "And anyway Blunt is
too romantic; and, moreover, he has been and is yet in love with you--a
thing that requires some style, an attitude, something of which I am
altogether incapable."

"You know it isn't so stupid, this what you have just said. Yes, there
is something in this."

"I am not stupid," I protested, without much heat.

"Oh, yes, you are. You don't know the world enough to judge. You don't
know how wise men can be. Owls are nothing to them. Why do you try to
look like an owl? There are thousands and thousands of them waiting for
me outside the door: the staring, hissing beasts. You don't know what a
relief of mental ease and intimacy you have been to me in the frankness
of gestures and speeches and thoughts, sane or insane, that we have been
thr