ey.
But, and that seemed odd to Benham, she would not believe, just as Lady
Marayne would not believe, that there was not some other woman in the
case. He assured her and she seemed reassured, and then presently she
was back at exactly the same question. Would no woman ever understand
the call of Asia, the pride of duty, the desire for the world?

One sort of woman perhaps....

It was odd that for the first time now, in the sunshine of Kensington
Gardens, he saw the little gossamer lines that tell that thirty years
and more have passed over a face, a little wrinkling of the eyelids, a
little hardening of the mouth. How slight it is, how invisible it
has been, how suddenly it appears! And the sunshine of the warm April
afternoon, heightened it may be by her determined unmercenary pose,
betrayed too the faintest hint of shabbiness in her dress. He had never
noticed these shadows upon her or her setting before and their effect
was to fill him with a strange regretful tenderness....

Perhaps men only begin to love when they cease to be dazzled and admire.
He had thought she might reproach him, he had felt and feared she might
set herself to stir his senses, and both these expectations had been
unjust to her he saw, now that he saw her beside him, a brave, rather
ill-advised and unlucky little struggler, stung and shamed. He forgot
the particulars of that first lunch of theirs together and he remembered
his mother's second contemptuous "STUFF!"

Indeed he knew now it had not been unexpected. Why hadn't he left this
little sensitive soul and this little sensitive body alone? And since
he hadn't done so, what right had he now to back out of their common
adventure? He felt a sudden wild impulse to marry Mrs. Skelmersdale, in
a mood between remorse and love and self-immolation, and then a sunlit
young woman with a leaping stride in her paces, passed across his
heavens, pointing to Asia and Utopia and forbidding even another thought
of the banns....

"You will kiss me good-bye, dear, won't you?" said Mrs. Skelmersdale,
brimming over. "You will do that."

He couldn't keep his arm from her little shoulders. And as their lips
touched he suddenly found himself weeping also....

His spirit went limping from that interview. She chose to stay behind
in her chair and think, she said, and each time he turned back she was
sitting in the same attitude looking at him as he receded, and she had
one hand on the chair back and her arm d