open again, and she was saying:--"No, I should not have done
anything of the sort. One laughs at young people, I know, when they are
so very inflammatory. But what do we think of them when they are not?"
She became quite warm and excited about it, or perhaps--so thought Mr.
Pellew as he threw his last cigarette-end away through that open
window--the blaze of a sun that was forecasting its afterglow made her
seem so. Mr. Pellew having thrown away that cigarette-end
conscientiously, and made a pretence of seeing it safe into the front
area, was hardly bound to go back to his chair. He dropped on the sofa,
beside Miss Dickenson, with one hand over the back. He loomed over her,
but she did not shy or flinch.

"What indeed!" said he seriously, answering her last words. "A young man
that does not fall in love seldom comes to any good." He was really
thinking to himself:--"Oh, the mistakes I should have been saved in
life, if only this had happened to me in my twenties!" He was not making
close calculation of what the lady's age would have been in those days.

She was dwelling on the abstract question:--"You know, say what one may,
the whole of their lives is at stake. And we never think them young
geese when the thing comes off, and they become couples."

"No. True enough. It's only when it goes off and they don't."

"And what is so creepy about it is that we never know whether the couple
is the right couple."

"Never know anything at all about anything beforehand!" Mr. Pellew was
really talking at random. Even the value of this trite remark was
spoiled. For he added:--"Nor afterwards, for that matter!"

Miss Dickenson admitted that we could not lay too much stress on our own
limitations. But she was not in the humour for platitudes. Her mind was
running on a problem that might have worried Juliet Capulet had she
never wedded her Romeo and taken a dose of hellebore, but lived on to
find that County Paris had in him the makings of a lovable mate. Quite
possible, you know! It was striking her that if a trothplight were
nothing but a sort of civil contract--civil in the sense of courteous,
polite, urbane, accommodating--an exchange of letters through a callous
Post Office--a woman might be engaged a dozen times and meet the males
implicated in after-life, without turning a hair. But even a hand-clasp,
left to enjoy itself by its parents--not nipped in the bud--might poison
their palms and recrudesce a little in Society, lo