led, making him feel all the time that
he was pointing out the road, she did not know how to begin. She sat
tongue-tied, racking her brains to loss of appetite; which was a pity,
for the maitre d'hotel, given a free hand by her barbarously ignorant
host, had composed a royal menu. As dinner proceeded she grew shyer than
a chit of sixteen. Over the quails a great silence reigned. Hers she
could not touch, but she watched him fork, as it seemed to her, one
after the other, whole, down his throat: and she adored him for it. It
was her ideal of manly gusto. She nearly wept into her _Fraises
Diane_--vast craggy strawberries (in March) rising from a drift of snow
impregnated by all the distillations of all the flowers of all the
summers of all the hills--because she would have given her soul to sit
beside him on the table with the bowl on her lap and feed him with a
tablespoon and, for her share of it, lick the spoon after his every
mouthful. But it had been drummed into her that she was a woman of the
world, the fashionable and all but incomprehensible world, the English
world. She looked around and saw a hundred of her sex practising the
well-bred deportment that Mrs. Considine had preached. She reflected
that to all of those women gently nurtured in this queer English
civilisation, equally remote from Armour's stockyards and from her
Albanian fastness, the wisdom that Barbara had imparted to her a few
hours before was but their A.B.C. of life in their dealings with their
male companions. She also reflected--and for the reflection not Mrs.
Considine or Barbara, only her woman's heart was responsible--that to
the man whom she yearned to feed with great tablespoonfuls of delight,
she counted no more than a pig or a cow--her instinctive similes, you
must remember, were pastoral--or that peculiar damfool of a sister of
his, Euphemia.

When I think of these two children of nature, sitting opposite to one
another in the fashionable restaurant trying to behave like
super-civilised dolls, I cannot help smiling. They were both so
thoroughly in earnest; and they bored themselves and each other so
dreadfully. Conversation patched sporadically great expanses of silence
and then they talked of the things that did not interest them in the
least. Of course they smiled at each other, the smirk being essential to
the polite atmosphere; and of course Jaffery played host in the orthodox
manner, and Liosha acknowledged attentions with a courte