manded and consumed. The days and hours of this new friend, as she
came to account him, were at all events unrolled, and however much more
she might have known she would still have wished to go beyond. In fact
she did go beyond; she went quite far enough.

But she could none the less, even after a month, scarce have told if the
gentlemen who came in with him recurred or changed; and this in spite of
the fact that they too were always posting and wiring, smoking in her
face and signing or not signing. The gentlemen who came in with him were
nothing when he was there. They turned up alone at other times--then
only perhaps with a dim richness of reference. He himself, absent as
well as present, was all. He was very tall, very fair, and had, in spite
of his thick preoccupations, a good-humour that was exquisite,
particularly as it so often had the effect of keeping him on. He could
have reached over anybody, and anybody--no matter who--would have let
him; but he was so extraordinarily kind that he quite pathetically
waited, never waggling things at her out of his turn nor saying "Here!"
with horrid sharpness. He waited for pottering old ladies, for gaping
slaveys, for the perpetual Buttonses from Thrupp's; and the thing in all
this that she would have liked most unspeakably to put to the test was
the possibility of her having for him a personal identity that might in a
particular way appeal. There were moments when he actually struck her as
on her side, as arranging to help, to support, to spare her.

But such was the singular spirit of our young friend that she could
remind herself with a pang that when people had awfully good
manners--people of that class,--you couldn't tell. These manners were
for everybody, and it might be drearily unavailing for any poor
particular body to be overworked and unusual. What he did take for
granted was all sorts of facility; and his high pleasantness, his
relighting of cigarettes while he waited, his unconscious bestowal of
opportunities, of boons, of blessings, were all a part of his splendid
security, the instinct that told him there was nothing such an existence
as his could ever lose by. He was somehow all at once very bright and
very grave, very young and immensely complete; and whatever he was at any
moment it was always as much as all the rest the mere bloom of his
beatitude. He was sometimes Everard, as he had been at the Hotel
Brighton, and he was sometimes Captain Ev