as consistent with
propriety, with reticence, with a perfect purity. And he began to wonder
whether his own view of it had not been a little shameless.

He rushed, for sheer decency, into a stuttering defense.

"Well, but--well, but--but it's all right, don't you know?"

"It's all right for men. They're different. But--"

"Not right for women?"

"If you reelly want to know--no. I don't think it is. It isn't pretty,
for one thing."

"Oh, I say--how about Winny?"

"Winny's different. It doesn't seem to matter so much for her."

"Why not--for her?"

"Well--she's a queer creature anyhow."

"How d'you mean--queer?"

"Well--more like a boy, somehow, than a girl. She doesn't care. She'll
do anything. And she's plucky. If she's taken a thing into her head
she'll go through with it whatever you say."

"Yes, she's got pluck," he assented. "_And_ cheek."

"Mind you, she's as good as gold, with all her queerness. But it _is_
queer, Mr. Ransome, if you're a woman, not to care what you do, or what
you look like doing it. And she's so innocent, she doesn't reelly know.
She couldn't do it if she did. All the same, I wish she wouldn't."

She seemed to brood over it in beautiful distress.

"It's a pity that the boys encourage them. Boys don't mind, of course.
But _men_ don't like it."

And with every word of her strange, magical voice there went from him
some shred of innocence and illusion. It was, of course, his innocence,
his ignorance that had made him tolerant of a Grand Display, that had
filled him with admiration for the Young Ladies of the Polytechnic
Gymnasium, and that had attracted him to Winny Dymond. Everything he had
thought and felt about Winny was illusion. It was illusion, that sense
she gave him of tenderness and of absurdity. Gymnastics were all very
well in their way. But nice women, the women that men cared about, women
like Violet Usher, did not make of their bodies a spectacle in Grand
Displays. Little Winny, whatever she did, was all right, of course; but
now he came to think of it, he began to wish, like Violet Usher, that
she wouldn't do it. It was as a boy and her comrade that he had admired
her. It was as a man that he criticized her now, looking at her through
Violet Usher's eyes. And it was as a boy that he had cared, and as a man
that he had ceased to care.

In one night Ranny had suddenly grown up.

Of course, it might have been different if she had cared for _him_.

"What does it m