ouldn't be for want of an attention definitely called to
her claims. She would have been tacitly rejected, virtually condemned.
He couldn't without an impulse of fatuity endeavour to make up for this
to her by consoling kindness; he was aware that if any one knew it a man
would be ridiculous who should take so much as that for granted. But no
one would know it: he oddly enough in this calculation of security left
Biddy herself out. It didn't occur to him that she might have a secret,
small irony to spare for his ingenious and magnanimous effort to show
her how much he liked her in reparation to her for not liking her more.
This high charity coloured at any rate the whole of his visit to
Rosedale Road, the whole of the pleasant, prolonged chat that kept him
there more than an hour. He begged the girl to go on with her work, not
to let him interrupt it; and she obliged him at last, taking the cloth
off the lump of clay and giving him a chance to be delightful by
guessing that the shapeless mass was intended, or would be intended
after a while, for Nick. He saw she was more comfortable when she began
again to smooth it and scrape it with her little stick, to manipulate it
with an ineffectual air of knowing how; for this gave her something to
do, relieved her nervousness and permitted her to turn away from him
when she talked.

He walked about the room and sat down; got up and looked at Nick's
things; watched her at moments in silence--which made her always say in
a minute that he was not to pass judgement or she could do nothing;
observed how her position before her high stand, her lifted arms, her
turns of the head, considering her work this way and that, all helped
her to be pretty. She repeated again and again that it was an immense
pity about Nick, till he was obliged to say he didn't care a straw for
Nick and was perfectly content with the company he found. This was not
the sort of tone he thought it right, given the conditions, to take; but
then even the circumstances didn't require him to pretend he liked her
less than he did. After all she was his cousin; she would cease to be so
if she should become his wife; but one advantage of her not entering
into that relation was precisely that she would remain his cousin. It
was very pleasant to find a young, bright, slim, rose-coloured kinswoman
all ready to recognise consanguinity when one came back from cousinless
foreign lands. Peter talked about family matters; he didn'