gn. Again he grinned awkwardly, a little ashamed of her
and a little ashamed of himself, because neither had behaved as woman or
man of the world.

After a short interval he followed in her steps as far as the gap in the
hedge, which he did not find easily. There was no sign of her. The gas
burned serenely in her bedroom, and the window was open. Then he saw
the window close up a little, and an arm in front of the drawn blind.
The rain had apparently ceased.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

SIX.

"Well, that's an eye-opener, that is!" he murmured, and thereby
expressed the situation. "Of all the damned impudence!" He somewhat
overstated his feelings, because he was posing a little to himself: an
accident that sooner or later happens to every man! "And she'll go back
and make out to Master Tom that she's just had a stroll in the garden!
Garden, indeed! And yet they're all so fearfully stuck on her."

He nodded his head several times reflectively, as if saying, "Well,
well! What next?" And he murmured aloud: "So that's how they carry on,
is it!" He meant, of course, women... He was very genuinely astounded.

But the chief of all his acute sensations in that moment was pride:
sheer pride. He thought, what ninety-nine men out of a hundred would
have thought in such circumstances: "She's taken a fancy to me!"
Useless to call him a conceited coxcomb, from disgust that he did not
conform to a sentimentally idealistic standard! He thought: "She's
taken a fancy to me!" And he was not a conceited coxcomb. He exulted
in the thought. Nothing had ever before so startled and uplifted him.
It constituted the supreme experience of his career as a human being.
The delightful and stimulating experience of his evening in the house of
the Orgreaves sank into unimportance by the side of it. The new avenues
towards joy which had been revealed to him appeared now to be quite
unexciting paths; he took them for granted. And he forgot the high and
serious mood of complex emotion in which he had entered the new house.
Music and the exotic flavours of a foreign language seemed a little
thing, in comparison with the feverish hand-clasp of the girl whom he so
peculiarly disliked. The lifeless hand which he had taken in the
drawing-room of the Orgreaves could not be the same hand as that which
had closed intimately on his under the porch. She must have two right
hands!

And, even