be surprising that any one should
fly from so broad-minded a step-daughter; but the happy family party
lasted a bare three months. I think Mrs. Harris had a perception--she
was the kind of woman who arrived obscurely at very correct
conclusions--that she was contributing to her step-daughter's amusement
in a manner which her most benevolent intentions had not contemplated,
and she was not by any means the little person to go on doing that
indefinitely, perhaps increasingly. Besides, it was in the natural order
of things that Dora should marry, and Mrs. Harris doubtless foresaw a
comfortable return for herself in the course of a year or two, when the
usual promising junior in 'the Department' should gild his own
prospects and promote the general well-being by acquiring its head for a
father-in-law. Things always worked out if you gave them time. How much
time you ought to give them was doubtless by now a pretty constant
query with the little lady in her foggy exile; for two years had already
passed and Dora had found no connection with any young man of the
Department more permanent than those prescribed at dinners and at
dances. It is doubtful, indeed, if she had had the opportunity. There
was no absolute means of knowing; but if offers were made they never
transpired, and Mrs. Harris, far away in England, nourished a certainty
that they never were made. Speaking with her intimate knowledge of the
sex she declared that Dora frightened the men, that her cleverness was
of a kind to paralyze any sentiment of the sort that might be expected.
It depended upon Mrs. Harris's humour whether this was Dora's misfortune
or her crime. She, Dora, never frightened me, and by the time her
cleverness dawned upon me, my sentiment about her had become too robust
to be paralyzed. On the contrary, the agreeable stimulus it gave me
was one of the things I counted most valuable in my life out there. It
hardly mattered, however, that I should confess this; I was not a young
man in Harris's department. I had a department of my own; and Dora,
though she frisked with me gloriously and bullied continually, must ever
have been aware of the formidable fact that I joined the Service two
years before Edward Harris did. The daughter of three generations of
bureaucrats was not likely to forget that at one time her father had
been junior to me in the same office, though in the course of time and
the march of opportunity he had his own show now, and we nodd