rearranged her flowers in silence for a
little while, at last she said--

"It is hateful to fail."

"It is ignominious, certainly; one does not wish to blazon it from the
housetops; still, doubtless like your crochet work, it is good
discipline."

"Maybe," Julia allowed, but without conviction. "Yours seems a simple
failure, mine is a compound one. If it is ignominious, as you say, to
fail, it would have been equally ignominious in another way if I had
succeeded. I could not have been satisfied either way."

"That sounds very complicated," Rawson-Clew said; "but then, I imagine
you are a complicated young person."

"And you are not."

"Not young, certainly," he said, lighting another cigarette.

"Nor complicated," she insisted; "you are built on straight lines;
there are given things you can do and can't do, would do and would not
do, and might do in an emergency. It is a fine kind of person to be,
but it is not the kind which surprises itself."

Rawson-Clew blew a smoke-ring into the air; he was smiling a little.

"How old are you?" he said. "Twenty? Almost twenty-one, is it? And
until you were sixteen you knocked about a bit? Sixteen is too young
to come much across the natural man--not the artful dodging man, or
the man of civilisation, but the natural, primitive man, own blood
relation to Adam and the king of the Cannibal Islands. You may meet
him by and by, and if you do he may surprise you; he is full of
surprises--he rather surprises himself, that is, if his local habitat
is ordinarily an educated, decent person."

"You have not got a natural man," Julia said shortly; she was annoyed,
without quite knowing why, by his manner.

"Have I not? Quite likely; certainly, he has never bothered me, but I
should not like to count on him. Since we have got to personalities,
may I say that you have got a natural woman, and plenty of her; also a
marked taste for the works of the machine, in preference to the face
usually presented to the company?"

"The works are the only interesting part; I don't care for the
drawing-room side of things; they are cultivated, but they are too
much on the skin. I would much rather be a stoker, or an engineer,
than sit on deck all day and talk about Florentine art, and the Handel
Festival, and Egyptology, and the gospel of Tolstoy, and play cricket
and quoits, and dance a little, and sing a little, and flirt a little,
ever so nicely. Oh, there are lots of girls who can do all th