she got up in the morning than was justifiable from any point
of view except the biological. She had no heroic quarrel with these
conditions--her experience had not been upon that plane--but she
bemoaned them with sincerity as too fundamental, too all pervading; one
came upon them at every turn, grinning in their pretty chains. It was
absurd, she construed, that a world of mankind and woman kind with
vastly interesting possibilities should be so essentially subjected.
So primitive, it was, she argued in her vivid candour, and so
interfering--so horribly interfering! Personally she did not see herself
one of the fugitive half of the race; she had her defences; but the
necessity of using them was matter for complaint when existence might
have been so delightful a boon without it, full of affinities and
communities in every direction. She had not, I am convinced, any of the
notions of a crusader upon this popular subject, nor may I portray her
either shocked or revolted, only rather bored, being a creature whom it
was unkind to hamper; and she would have explained quite in these simple
terms the reason why Stephen Arnold's saving neutrality of temperament
was to her a pervasive charm of his society.

She had not yet felt at liberty to tell him that she could not classify
him, that she had never known anyone like him before; and there was in
this no doubt a vague perception that the confession showed a limitation
of experience on her part for which he might be inclined to call her to
account; since cultured young Oxonians with an altruistic bias, if they
do not exactly abound, are still often enough to be discovered if one
happens to belong to the sphere which they haunt, they and their ideals.
Not that any such consideration led her to gloss or to minimise the
disabilities of her own. She sat sometimes in gravest wonder, pinching
her lips, and watched the studiously modified interest of his glance
following her into its queer byways--her sphere's--full of spangles and
limelight, and the first-class hysteria of third-class rival artistry.
There was a fascination in bringing him out of his remoteness near to
those things, a speculation worth making as to what he might do. This
remained ungratified, for he never did anything. He only let it appear
by the most indefinite signs possible, that he saw what she saw, peering
over his paling, and she in the picturesque tangle outside found it
enough.

He was there when she came ba