ed ready to listen. Mrs. Baxter ignored the possibility
of any serious purpose on May's side and pointed out with motherly
gentleness that her impulsive interest in Quisante might possibly be
misunderstood by him and give rise to an idea absolutely remote from any
which it was May's intention to arouse. Then she would give pain;
wouldn't it be better gradually, not roughly or rudely but by slow
degrees, to diminish the time she spent with Quisante and the attention
she bestowed on him? Mrs. Baxter's remonstrance, if somewhat
conventional, yet was artistic in its way.

But May Gaston laughed; it was all very familiar, sounded very old, and
was ludicrously wide of the mark. She had not been careless, she had not
suffered from the dangerous stupidity of ultra-maidenly blindness, she
knew quite well how Quisante felt. Accordingly she would not acquiesce in
Mrs. Baxter's diplomatic ignoring of the only material point--how she
felt herself. Of course if all Mrs. Baxter meant to convey was her own
disapproval of the idea,--well, she conveyed so much. But then nobody
needed to be told of that; it was quite obvious and it was not important;
it was an insignificant atom in the great inevitable mass of disapproval
which any marked liking for Quisante (May shrank from even thinking of
stronger terms) must arouse. She had far too much understanding of the
disapproval and far too much sympathy with it to underrate the probable
extent and depth of it; to a half of herself she was with it, heart and
soul; to a half of herself the impulse that drove her towards Quisante
was something hardly rational and wholly repulsive. What purpose, then,
did Mrs. Baxter's traditional motherliness serve?

There was one person with whom she wished to talk, who might, she
thought, help her to understand herself and thus to guide her steps. For
every day it became more and more obvious that the matter would have to
be faced and ended one way or the other. Quisante was not patient, and he
would not be dealt with by way of favour. And she herself was in a
turmoil and a contradiction of feeling which she summed up antithetically
by declaring that she disliked him more every hour he was there and
missed him more every hour he was not; or, to adopt the Dean's metaphor,
his presence set her teeth on edge and his absence made her feel as if
she had nothing to eat. Morewood might help her; he would at least
understand something of how she felt, if she could summ