They
had cultivated each other's absence carefully in the drawing-room, and
had convinced themselves that neither was necessary to the other. That
clause having been carried nem. con., they were entitled to five
minutes' chat, without prejudice. Neither remembered, perhaps, the
convert to temperance who decided that passing a public-house door _a
contre-coeur_ entitled him to half-a-pint.

"How did you get on with little Di Accrington?" the lady had said. And
the gentleman had answered:--"First-rate. Talked to her about _your_
partner all the time. How did you hit it off with him?" A sympathetic
laugh over the response: "Capitally--he talked about _her_, of course!"
quite undid the fiction woven with so much pains indoors, and also as it
were lighted a little collateral fire they might warm their fingers at,
or burn them. However, a parade of their well-worn seniority, their old
experience of life, would keep them safe from _that_. Only it wouldn't
do to neglect it.

Mr. Pellew recognised the obligation first. "Offly amusin'!--young
people," said he, claiming, as the countryman of Shakespeare, his share
of insight into Romeo and Juliet.

"Same old story, over and over again!" said Aunt Constance. They posed
as types of elderliness that had no personal concern in love-affairs,
and could afford to smile at juvenile flirtations. Mr. Pellew felt
interested in Miss Dickenson's bygone romances, implied in the slight
shade of sentiment in her voice--wondered in fact how the doose this
woman had missed her market; this was the expression his internal
soliloquy used. She for her part was on the whole glad that an intensely
Platonic friendship didn't admit of catechism, as she was better pleased
to leave the customers in that market to the uninformed imagination of
others, than to be compelled to draw upon her own.

The fact was that, in spite of its thinness and slightness, this
Platonic friendship with a mature bachelor whose past--while she
acquitted him of atrocities--she felt was safest kept out of sight, had
already gone quite as near to becoming a love-affair as anything her
memory could discover among her own rather barren antecedents. So there
was a certain sort of affectation in Aunt Constance's suggestion of
familiarity with Romeo and Juliet. She wished, without telling lies, to
convey the idea that the spinsterhood four very married sisters did not
scruple to taunt her with, was either of her own choosing or due t