dy from a fall, and white as
death. "And cool as a cucumber, too," said Cothope, turning it over in
his mind as he told me.

("They never seem quite to have their heads, and never seem quite to
lose 'em," said Cothope, generalising about the sex.)

Also he witnessed she acted with remarkable decision. The question
was whether I should be taken to the house her step-mother occupied at
Bedley Corner, the Carnaby dower house, or down to Carnaby's place at
Easting. Beatrice had no doubt in the matter, for she meant to nurse me.
Carnaby didn't seem to want that to happen. "She WOULD have it wasn't
half so far," said Cothope. "She faced us out....

"I hate to be faced out of my opinion, so I've taken a pedometer over it
since. It's exactly forty-three yards further.

"Lord Carnaby looked at her pretty straight," said Cothope, finishing
the picture; "and then he give in."

V

But my story has made a jump from June to October, and during that time
my relations with Beatrice and the countryside that was her setting had
developed in many directions. She came and went, moving in an orbit
for which I had no data, going to London and Paris, into Wales and
Northampton, while her stepmother, on some independent system of her
own, also vanished and recurred intermittently. At home they obeyed the
rule of an inflexible old maid, Charlotte, and Beatrice exercised
all the rights of proprietorship in Carnaby's extensive stables. Her
interest in me was from the first undisguised. She found her way to my
worksheds and developed rapidly, in spite of the sincere discouragement
of Cothope, into a keen amateur of aeronautics. She would come sometimes
in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes afoot with an
Irish terrier, sometimes riding. She would come for three or four days
every day, vanish for a fortnight or three weeks, return.

It was not long before I came to look for her. From the first I
found her immensely interesting. To me she was a new feminine type
altogether--I have made it plain, I think, how limited was my knowledge
of women. But she made me not simply interested in her, but in myself.
She became for me something that greatly changes a man's world. How
shall I put it? She became an audience. Since I've emerged from the
emotional developments of the affair I have thought it out in a hundred
aspects, and it does seem to me that this way in which men and women
make audiences for one another is a curiously influen