usly childlike and humorous kind, so that it generally fell to
her lot to listen and ask questions.

He told her not only what had happened, but what he had thought and
felt, and sketched for her portraits which fascinated her of what other
men and women might be supposed to be thinking and feeling, so that she
became very anxious to go back to England, which was full of people,
where she could merely stand in the streets and look at them. According
to him, too, there was an order, a pattern which made life reasonable,
or if that word was foolish, made it of deep interest anyhow, for
sometimes it seemed possible to understand why things happened as they
did. Nor were people so solitary and uncommunicative as she believed.
She should look for vanity--for vanity was a common quality--first in
herself, and then in Helen, in Ridley, in St. John, they all had their
share of it--and she would find it in ten people out of every twelve she
met; and once linked together by one such tie she would find them not
separate and formidable, but practically indistinguishable, and she
would come to love them when she found that they were like herself.

If she denied this, she must defend her belief that human beings were as
various as the beasts at the Zoo, which had stripes and manes, and
horns and humps; and so, wrestling over the entire list of their
acquaintances, and diverging into anecdote and theory and speculation,
they came to know each other. The hours passed quickly, and seemed to
them full to leaking-point. After a night's solitude they were always
ready to begin again.

The virtues which Mrs. Ambrose had once believed to exist in free talk
between men and women did in truth exist for both of them, although not
quite in the measure she prescribed. Far more than upon the nature of
sex they dwelt upon the nature of poetry, but it was true that talk
which had no boundaries deepened and enlarged the strangely small bright
view of a girl. In return for what he could tell her she brought him
such curiosity and sensitiveness of perception, that he was led to doubt
whether any gift bestowed by much reading and living was quite the equal
of that for pleasure and pain. What would experience give her after all,
except a kind of ridiculous formal balance, like that of a drilled dog
in the street? He looked at her face and wondered how it would look
in twenty years' time, when the eyes had dulled, and the forehead wore
those little pers