to say these incantatory words of salvation!

And the romantic, adventurous fool in him rejoiced at their failure.
For he was adventurously happy in his propinquity to that simple and
sincere creature. He was so happy, and his heart was so active,
that he even made no caustic characteristic comment on the singular
behaviour of the beings who had just abandoned them to their
loneliness. He was also proud because he was sitting alone nearly in
the dark with a piquant and wealthy, albeit amateur actress, who had
just participated in a triumph at which the spiritual aristocracy of
London had assisted.

VI

Two thoughts ran through his head, shooting in and out and to and fro
among his complex sensations of pleasure. The first was that he had
never been in such a fix before, despite his enterprising habits. And
the second was that neither Elsie April nor anybody else connected
with his affairs in London had ever asked him whether he was married,
or assumed by any detail of behaviour towards him that there existed
the possibility of his being married. Of course he might, had he
chosen, have informed a few of them that a wife and children possessed
him, but then really would not that have been equivalent to attaching
a label to himself: "Married"? a procedure which had to him the stamp
of provinciality.

Elsie April said nothing. And as she said nothing he was obliged to
say something, if only to prove to both of them that he was not a mere
tongue-tied provincial. He said:

"You know I feel awfully out of it here in this Society of yours!"

"Out of it?" she exclaimed, and her voice thrilled as she resented his
self-depreciation.

"It's over my head--right over it!"

"Now, Mr. Machin," she said, dropping somewhat that rich low voice,
"I quite understand that there are some things about the Society you
don't like, trifles that you're inclined to laugh at. _I_ know that.
Many of us know it. But it can't be helped in an organization
like ours. It's even essential. Don't be too hard on us. Don't be
sarcastic."

"But I'm not sarcastic!" he protested.

"Honest?" She turned to him quickly. He could descry her face in the
gloom, and the forward bend of her shoulders, and the backward
sweep of her arms resting on the seat, and the straight droop of her
Egyptian shawl from her inclined body.

"Honest!" he solemnly insisted.

The exchange of this single word was so intimate that it shifted their
conversation to a di