ence became preposterous and all the
moral values altered altogether. I had waited for her outside the door
of the Parsian-robe establishment in Kensington High Street and walked
home with her thence. I remember how she emerged into the warm evening
light and that she wore a brown straw hat that made her, for once not
only beautiful but pretty.

"I like that hat," I said by way of opening; and she smiled her rare
delightful smile at me.

"I love you," I said in an undertone, as we jostled closer on the
pavement.

She shook her head forbiddingly, but she still smiled. Then--"Be
sensible!"

The High Street pavement is too narrow and crowded for conversation and
we were some way westward before we spoke again.

"Look here," I said; "I want you, Marion. Don't you understand? I want
you."

"Now!" she cried warningly.

I do not know if the reader will understand how a passionate lover,
an immense admiration and desire, can be shot with a gleam of positive
hatred. Such a gleam there was in me at the serene self-complacency of
that "NOW!" It vanished almost before I felt it. I found no warning in
it of the antagonisms latent between us.

"Marion," I said, "this isn't a trifling matter to me. I love you; I
would die to get you.... Don't you care?"

"But what is the good?"

"You don't care," I cried. "You don't care a rap!"

"You know I care," she answered. "If I didn't--If I didn't like you very
much, should I let you come and meet me--go about with you?"

"Well then," I said, "promise to marry me!"

"If I do, what difference will it make?"

We were separated by two men carrying a ladder who drove between us
unawares.

"Marion," I asked when we got together again, "I tell you I want you to
marry me."

"We can't."

"Why not?"

"We can't marry--in the street."

"We could take our chance!"

"I wish you wouldn't go on talking like this. What is the good?"

She suddenly gave way to gloom. "It's no good marrying" she said. "One's
only miserable. I've seen other girls. When one's alone one has a little
pocket-money anyhow, one can go about a little. But think of being
married and no money, and perhaps children--you can't be sure...."

She poured out this concentrated philosophy of her class and type in
jerky uncompleted sentences, with knitted brows, with discontented eyes
towards the westward glow--forgetful, it seemed, for a moment even of
me.

"Look here, Marion," I said abruptly, "what would you mar