bout
friendship, and you sighed a smile in a yawn, as it were--do you know
Browning?--he is a dear--and said: 'I am going to settle down and
marry.' Now, not a word. I am going to scold you. Had we been two girls
talking together, and had just made vows of friendship, it would have
been utterly tactless for the one to choose that exact moment for saying
she was going to be married; and I am sure no two boys in similar
conditions would ever have done such a thing."

Again Jeannie laughed.

"It sounds so funny now," she said. "But it was such a snub. I suppose
you thought we were getting on too nicely. Oh, how funny! I have never
had such a thing happen to me before. So I blame you just a little
bit. I was rather depressed already. A thunderstorm was coming, and it
was going to be Sunday, and so I wanted everybody to be particularly
nice to me."

He gave a little odd awkward sort of laugh, and jerked himself a little
more forward in his chair.

"Mayn't I look?" he said. "I don't believe you are scarlet. Besides, I
have to say I am sorry. I can't say I am sorry to the carpet."

Jeannie paused for a moment before she replied; something in his voice,
though still she could not see his face clearly, startled her. It
sounded changed, somehow, full of something suppressed, something
serious. But she could not risk a second fiasco; she had to play her
high cards out, and hope for their triumph.

"You needn't say it," she said. "And so let us pass to what I
suggested, and what you would have made, you told me, a condition of
your forgiving me. Friendship! What a beautiful word in itself, and
what a big one! And how little most people mean by it. A man says he
is a woman's friend because he lunches with her once a month; a woman
says she is a man's friend because they have taken a drive round Hyde
Park in the middle of the afternoon!"

Jeannie sat more upright in her chair, leaning forward towards him. Then
she saw him more clearly, and the hunger of his face, the bright shining
of his eyes, endorsed what she had heard in his voice. Yet she was not
certain--not quite certain.

"Oh, I don't believe we most of us understand friendship at all," she
said. "It is not characteristic of our race to let ourselves feel. Most
English people neither hate nor love, nor make friends in earnest. I
think one has to go South--South and East--to find hate and love and
friends, just as one has to go South to find the sun. Do you know the