nctions do not
effectively count. Nothing counted where she was concerned, except a
distinction far more profound than any social distinction--the historic
distinction between Adam and Eve. She was balm to Priam Farll. She might
have been equally balm to King David, Uriah the Hittite, Socrates,
Rousseau, Lord Byron, Heine, or Charlie Peace. She would have understood
them all. They would all have been ready to cushion themselves on her
comfortableness. Was she a lady? Pish! She was a woman.

Her temperament drew Priam Farll like an electrified magnet. To wander
about freely in that roomy sympathy of hers seemed to him to be the
supreme reward of experience. It seemed like the good inn after the
bleak high-road, the oasis after the sandstorm, shade after glare, the
dressing after the wound, sleep after insomnia, surcease from
unspeakable torture. He wanted, in a word, to tell her everything,
because she would not demand any difficult explanations. She had given
him an opening, in her mention of savings. In reply to her suggestion,
"You must have put a good bit by," he could casually answer:

"Yes, a hundred and forty thousand pounds."

And that would lead by natural stages to a complete revealing of the fix
in which he was. In five minutes he would have confided to her the
principal details, and she would have understood, and then he could
describe his agonizing and humiliating half-hour in the Abbey, and she
would pour her magic oil on that dreadful abrasion of his sensitiveness.
And he would be healed of his hurts, and they would settle between them
what he ought to do.

He regarded her as his refuge, as fate's generous compensation to him
for the loss of Henry Leek (whose remains now rested in the National
Valhalla).

Only, it would be necessary to begin the explanation, so that one thing
might by natural stages lead to another. On reflection, it appeared
rather abrupt to say:

"Yes, a hundred and forty thousand pounds."

The sum was too absurdly high (though correct). The mischief was that,
unless the sum did strike her as absurdly high, it could not possibly
lead by a natural stage to the remainder of the explanation.

He must contrive another path. For instance--

"There's been a mistake about the so-called death of Priam Farll."

"A mistake!" she would exclaim, all ears and eyes.

Then he would say--

"Yes. Priam Farll isn't really dead. It's his valet that's dead."

Whereupon she would burst out--