e English
standard. That he had little experience of life as it is lived, of its
balance and proportion and perspective, was clear from the way in which
he had flung himself and his money into the midst of the Guion
disasters. No man of the world could possibly have done that. The very
fact of his doing it made him lawfully a subject for some of the
epithets Ashley applied to him. Almost any one would apply them who
wanted to take him from a hostile point of view.

She forgot herself so far as to smile faintly. It was just the sort of
deficiency which she had it in her power to make up. The reflection set
her to dreaming when she wanted to be doing something else. She could
have brought him the dower of all the things he didn't know, while he
could give her.... But she caught herself again.

"What kind of a woman am I?"

She began to be afraid. She began to see in herself the type she most
detested--the woman who could deliberately marry a man and not be loyal
to him. She was on the threshold of marriage with Ashley, and she was
thinking of the marvel of life with some one else. When one of the inner
Voices denied this charge, another pressed it home by nailing the
precise incident on which her heart had been dwelling. "You were
thinking of this--of that--of the time on the stairs when, with his face
close to yours, he asked you if you loved the man you'd be going away
with--of the evening at the gate when your hand was in his and it was so
hard to take it away. He has no position to offer you. There's nothing
remarkable about him beyond a capacity for making money. He's beneath
you from every point of view except that of his mere manhood, and yet
you feel that you could let yourself slip into that--into the strength
and peace of it--"

She caught herself again--impatiently. It was no use! There was
something wilful within her, something that could be called by even a
stronger name, that worked back to the point from which she tried to
flee, whatever means she took to get away from it.

She returned to her work, persuading Cousin Cherry to go home to tea and
leave her to finish the task alone. Even while she did so one of the
inner Voices taunted her by saying: "That'll leave you all the more free
to dream of--_him_."

* * * * *

Some days passed before she felt equal to talking about Davenant again.
This time it was to the tinkling silver, as she and Drusilla Fane sorted
spoons a