ly
said she wasn't your sort. And if you want to know whether I like Signor
Morello and Signorina Gina Lunelli, I can tell you I certainly don't.
And your doing this sort of thing puts mother in a very awkward
position; she won't know whether she can logically scold you or not. She
sent you out to see things, didn't she? Well, you've seen them now,
that's one thing--quite enough for one morning.'

Tommy, it seemed, had got his enjoyment out of the business. He had, he
informed Betty, 'been helping Miss Varley to look for her cousin all
over the place.' Miss Varley's version was, 'Mr. Crevequer came about
with me; I don't know what use he thought he was, except to suggest
quite impossible places, and to talk till I felt quite giddy with it.
The way those absurd infants babble! And it's mostly such nonsense, when
one listens to it; they always make me feel as if I was Alice and they
were Tweedledum and Tweedledee; or perhaps the White Knight, because of
the sort of gentle melancholy they've got. When they come to a meal it's
exactly like the Mad Tea-Party. And it's so ridiculous the way, when one
of them stops to stammer, the other finishes the remark, or goes on with
it till the first one is ready again.'

Tommy's relations with Miss Varley had, during the past months, greatly
interested him. As she so pleased him externally, it was natural that he
should desire to make friends; and as this was an enterprise in which he
was not used to fail, he embarked on it with some audacity. There was a
certain detachment, lack of human interest, about Prudence Varley, as he
saw her, which were to him merely walls to be knocked down. He set about
razing them with cheerful serenity. It had certainly never occurred to
him that, if he wished to make friends with anyone, he would have any
difficulty in doing so. But the walls were rather solid, he found.
Against the battering-rams of his light-hearted sociability and
friendliness they seemed to stand firm; he was only occasionally cheered
by 'her eyes when she's going to smile.'

He one evening came to dinner in a mood of reckless resolution; however
uninterested, she should this one night be interested, more or less, in
him; he would break through the guard somehow and 'achieve intimacy.'
He skilfully arranged contiguity with her when they sat on the balcony
after dinner and listened to the mandolins in the road below. To tune
the scene to the note of seriousness he regarded as desira