Miss Arden raised severe eyes.

“I’m sure Mr. Ramsay would be quite surprised if he could hear you say that he writes on that subject, Mr. Hengist. I have not yet read his books, but I’m sure—”

“The modern school of novelists,” Lawrence interrupted, “is for ever probing into the character of woman. Stephen is young yet. In any case I think his handling of the subject most skilful and delicate.”

“There seem to me to be too many books written nowadays on those lines,” said Miss Arden. “I consider it most unnecessary.”

When Mr. Hengist at last met Stephen he seemed to like him. He discussed the Novel with Stephen, who grew quite excited, and ran his long fingers through his hair until it became riotous, and curled more than ever. He talked of Petronius Arbiter, and Lawrence coughed, with a warning glance towards Elizabeth. As Elizabeth had never heard of Petronius this precaution was useless. Mr. Hengist then said, take Le Sage, for instance, and once more they were plunged into a discussion. Lawrence informed everybody that he could see nothing in these Satirists, and that he thought that the adventures of Gil Bias de Santillone had better have been left untold.

“Ah, then you are probably no admirer of Smollett either?” Stephen said.

“No, I can’t say that I am,” Lawrence answered with perfect truth, having but the haziest notion of Smollett’s identity.

“Smollett?” grunted Mr. Hengist. “A copyist, Ramsay. No Le Sage, no Smollett.”

“Not entirely, sir,” Stephen maintained.

Elizabeth sat silent, withdrawn into herself, thinking how clever Stephen was, and how delightful it was to know him. She was reading “Celandine” in her spare time and trying to see Stephen in it. That was difficult, even rather perturbing because “Celandine” was a queer book, she thought, and sometimes, if she read it aright, rather broad. Much of it she did not understand; passages of obscure meaning caused her to wrinkle her brow and wonder whether she was dense, or just innocent. Yet it was surely impossible that the Stephen she knew, the man she thought to be the real Stephen, would write of things of which he would not speak to his girl-friends. Or if he wrote them, then he had for the moment assumed a pose, and was no longer himself but perhaps one of his own characters.

Stephen knew that she was reading his book, and although he wanted her to read it and to like it, he was also anxious and strangely diffident.

“You’re wasting your time,” he said once. “It’s mere froth. Don’t bother.”

“You behave as though you don’t want me to read it,” she teased him.

“I don’t. Yes, I do. Oh, lord, I don’t know whether I do or don’t! I’ll write something better, more worthy of your notice. The style of that’s bad—in parts. And it’s muddle-headed too, I think.”