s--I almost wish I
were a man. In order to be able to do all the things that you are going
to do."

"For you," I said, "for you."

I stretched out my hand for hers, and my gesture went disregarded.

She sat rather crouched together with her eyes gazing far away across
the great spaces of the park.

"That is what women are for," she said. "To make men see how splendid
life can be. To lift them up--out of a sort of timid grubbiness----" She
turned upon me suddenly. "Stephen," she said, "promise me. Whatever you
become, you promise and swear here and now never to be grey and grubby,
never to be humpy and snuffy, never to be respectable and modest and
dull and a little fat, like--like everybody. Ever."

"I swear," I said.

"By me."

"By you. No book to kiss! Please, give me your hand."

Sec. 8

All through that summer we saw much of each other. I was up at the House
perhaps every other day; we young people were supposed to be all in a
company together down by the tennis lawns, but indeed we dispersed and
came and went by a kind of tacit understanding, Guy and Philip each with
one of the Fawney girls and I with Mary. I put all sorts of
constructions upon the freedom I was given with her, but I perceive now
that we still seemed scarcely more than children to Lady Ladislaw, and
that the idea of our marriage was as inconceivable to her as if we had
been brother and sister. Matrimonially I was as impossible as one of the
stable boys. All the money I could hope to earn for years to come would
not have sufficed even to buy Mary clothes. But as yet we thought little
of matters so remote, glad in our wonderful new discovery of love, and
when at last I went off to Oxford, albeit the parting moved us to much
tenderness and vows and embraces, I had no suspicion that never more in
all our lives would Mary and I meet freely and gladly without
restriction. Yet so it was. From that day came restraints and
difficulties; the shadow of furtiveness fell between us; our
correspondence had to be concealed.

I went to Oxford as one goes into exile; she to London. I would post to
her so that the letters reached Landor House before lunch time when the
sun of Lady Ladislaw came over the horizon, but indeed as yet no one was
watching her letters. Afterwards as she moved about she gave me other
instructions, and for the most part I wrote to her in envelopes
addressed for her by one of the Fawney girls, who was under her spell
and made