though they were traitors.

He basked in her pity. "They're not. I never could play football at the
University."

She rose and stood beside him at the table, so that he would feel how
sorry she was, and set one finger to her lips and murmured, "Well,
well!" and at the end of a warm, drowsy moment, after which they seemed
to know each other much better, she said softly and irrelevantly, "I saw
you capped."

"Did you so? How did you notice me? It was one of the big graduations."

"I went with my mother to see my cousin Jeanie capped M.A., and we saw
your name on the list. Philip Mactavish James. And mother said, 'Yon'll
be the son of Mactavish James. Many's the time I've danced with him when
I was Ellen Forbes.' Funny to think of them dancing!"

"Oh, father was a great man for the ladies." They both laughed. He
vacillated from the emotional business of the moment. "Do you dance?" he
asked.

"I did at school--"

"Don't you go to dances?"

She shook her head. It was a shame, thought Mr. Philip.

With that long slender waist she should have danced so beautifully; he
could imagine how her head would droop back and show her throat, how her
brows would become grave with great pleasure. He wished she could come
to his mother's dances, but he knew so well the rigid standards of his
own bourgeoisie that he felt displeased by his wish. It was impossible
to ask a Miss Melville to a dance unless one could say, 'She's the
daughter of old Mr. Melville in Moray Place. Do you not mind Melville,
the wine merchant?' and specially impossible to ask this Miss Melville
unless one had some such certificate to attach to her vividness. But he
wished he could dance with her.

Ellen recalled him to the business of pity. She had thought of dances
for no more than a minute, though it had long been one of her dreams to
enter a ballroom by a marble staircase (which she imagined of a size and
steepness really more suited to a water-chute), carrying a black
ostrich-feather fan such as she had seen Sarah Bernhardt pythoning about
with in "La Dame aux Camelias." This hour she had dedicated to Mr.
Philip, and he knew it. She was thinking of him with an intentness which
was associated with an entire obliviousness of his personal presence,
just as a church circle might pray fervently for some missionary without
attempting to visualise his face; and though he missed this quaint
meaning of her abstraction, he was well content to watch it and nurse