sumes a
factitious importance to you, because it has been made permanent by
being written down. All mankind think thoughts as bad as those of people
they most love on earth, but such thoughts never getting embodied on
paper, it becomes assumed that they never existed. I daresay that you
yourself have thought some disagreeable thing or other of me, which
would seem just as bad as this if written. I challenge you, now, to tell
me.'

'The worst thing I have thought of you?'

'Yes.'

'I must not.'

'Oh yes.'

'I thought you were rather round-shouldered.'

Knight looked slightly redder.

'And that there was a little bald spot on the top of your head.'

'Heh-heh! Two ineradicable defects,' said Knight, there being a faint
ghastliness discernible in his laugh. 'They are much worse in a lady's
eye than being thought self-conscious, I suppose.'

'Ah, that's very fine,' she said, too inexperienced to perceive her hit,
and hence not quite disposed to forgive his notes. 'You alluded to me in
that entry as if I were such a child, too. Everybody does that. I cannot
understand it. I am quite a woman, you know. How old do you think I am?'

'How old? Why, seventeen, I should say. All girls are seventeen.'

'You are wrong. I am nearly nineteen. Which class of women do you like
best, those who seem younger, or those who seem older than they are?'

'Off-hand I should be inclined to say those who seem older.'

So it was not Elfride's class.

'But it is well known,' she said eagerly, and there was something
touching in the artless anxiety to be thought much of which she revealed
by her words, 'that the slower a nature is to develop, the richer the
nature. Youths and girls who are men and women before they come of age
are nobodies by the time that backward people have shown their full
compass.'

'Yes,' said Knight thoughtfully. 'There is really something in that
remark. But at the risk of offence I must remind you that you there take
it for granted that the woman behind her time at a given age has not
reached the end of her tether. Her backwardness may be not because she
is slow to develop, but because she soon exhausted her capacity for
developing.'

Elfride looked disappointed. By this time they were indoors. Mrs.
Swancourt, to whom match-making by any honest means was meat and
drink, had now a little scheme of that nature concerning this pair. The
morning-room, in which they both expected to find her, was empty; the
o