, I am altogether out of place among that kind of people.
I have all sorts of old-fashioned ideas about women. I know they are
unpopular. They are thought to be bourgeois, and entertained only by
the middle classes. But there you are--I am bourgeois; or perhaps I
belong to a lower class even than that. I'm a working man."

"Can you find a chair for me somewhere?" asked the girl. "Of course I
don't agree with you in the least, but it's rather interesting to hear
you."

He found a chair for her and stood by her side. "I'm so glad it wasn't
you."

"How do you know it wasn't I?" she asked.

"Because you're not that sort! You don't drink liqueurs. You don't
smoke cigarettes!"

"Why not?"

"I don't know," replied Paul; "but you don't. If you did--well, it
would be wrong somehow. I can't explain it, but it feels to me
something like--well, what I think a Roman Catholic would feel if he
found someone trying to caricature the Virgin Mary." His voice was so
earnest and sincere that she could not be offended.

"I am not like all these men here," went on Paul. "I was brought up
among the working-classes, and I have, in spite of everything,
idealised women. I expect it is because I love my mother. And when I
see a girl drinking liqueurs, smoking cigarettes, and doing things like
that, I feel that somehow my ideal is, well, besmirched somehow. I
believe less in the modesty of women, and I think it's a bad thing for
any man to lower his ideals concerning women! Yes, I am so glad it
wasn't you!"

"Still I don't understand why."

"Because you are the most sacred thing in my life!" he answered. "I
have tried to tell you that before now, only somehow I haven't been
able. You are the most wonderful thing in the world to me, and you
hate these things too, don't you?"

"Why should you think so? There are many better girls than I who smoke
and drink liqueurs."

"No," said Paul. "No. Do you know that, although I have hated you,
you've been the one dream of my life, and that you've made everything
possible to me? You're angry with me, aren't you?"

"No," she replied, "not angry. But still, you must not speak to me
like that!"

"I cannot help it," he replied. "Do you know that but for you I should
not have been a Member of Parliament now?"

"But for me?"

"Yes," said Paul. "From the first time I saw you, just after I came
out of Strangeways Jail, you've always inspired me, even while you
angered me,