e."

Charmian stared. This very quiet, very neat, and very practical woman
had astonished her.

"Do you?" she almost blurted out.

"It's very, very difficult. But I wish to and try to. Do you know, I
think perhaps that is why you have told me all this."

"Perhaps it is," said Charmian. "I could never have told it to anyone
else."

CHAPTER IX

Just before Charmian left England Mrs. Mansfield had begun to suspect
her secret. Already from time to time she had wondered whether Charmian
refused to accept Claude Heath, as she had accepted all the other
habitues of the house, because she really liked him much better than she
liked them. She had wondered and she had said, "No, it is not so." Had
she not been less than frank with herself, and for another reason which
made her reluctant to see truth? She scarcely knew. But when Charmian
was gone and her mother was quite alone, she felt almost sure that she
had to face a fact very unpleasant to her. There had been something in
the girl's eyes as she said good-bye, a slight hardness, a lurking
defiance, something about her lips, something even in the sound of her
voice which had troubled Mrs. Mansfield, which continued to trouble her
while Charmian was away.

Charmian in love with Claude Heath!

It seemed to the mother in those first moments of contemplation that, if
she were right in her surmise, Charmian could scarcely have set her
affections on a man less suited to enter into her life, less likely to
make her happy.

Charmian belonged to a certain world not merely because she was born in
it, and had always lived in it, but by temperament, by character.
Essentially she was of it. She could surely never be happy in the life
led by Claude Heath. Could Claude Heath be happy in the sort of life led
by her?

Abruptly Mrs. Mansfield felt as if she did not really know Heath very
well. A great many things about him she knew. But how much of him was
beyond her ken. She was not even sure how he regarded Charmian. Now she
wished very much to be more clear about that.

Among her many friends Heath stood apart, and for this reason: all the
other men of talent whom she knew intimately were in the same set, or
belonged to sets which overlapped and intermingled. They were men who
were making, or had made, their names; men who knew, and were known by,
her friends and acquaintances, who needed no explanation, who were
thoroughly "in it." Only Heath was outside, was unknown,