That would gall him, he felt; he would never take to wife the girl who was careless of her kisses and flirted with every man who came. He knew many such, liked them, had flirted with them, and knew that there was no harm in them beyond a certain volatility. It was not through Puritan spectacles that he regarded them; he knew them to be products merely of the new age, who had thrown away restraints in the same light-hearted way that they had thrown away their corsets. No doubt this recklessness, this brazen flaunting of charms that were more alluring veiled, was of no more than surface depth, yet he felt, singularly egotistic, that he would not choose a wife from this short-skirted, sleeveless sisterhood, but would rather, Oriental-wise, take a girl like Elizabeth, whom no other man should know.

If Elizabeth were old-fashioned, then how well she would blend with the flowers of his garden. She belonged to the age of Sweet-Williams and London Pride; he pictured her, a maid of long ago, demurely gowned, with a tiny posy of flowers in her hands. Cynthia said that she harked from Mid-Victorian times, but Cynthia was wrong. The Elizabeth round whom he built his whimsical fancies belonged to no age, but was symbolic of the eternal dream woman. Least of all could she be typical of an age that was ugly, and saw indecencies everywhere, even in piano legs.

Cynthia could not shatter his rosy dream, hard though she might try. Cynthia said, For God’s sake, come out of the mists! and wondered what had happened to him. She told him that he was cheating himself, that the Elizabeth he was in love with was an Elizabeth of his imagination and not the true one. He thought her jealous, even feline, and his beliefs remained unshaken. He coaxed his mother to call on Miss Arden and eagerly awaited her verdict.

“Such an alarming woman!” she said, smiling sweetly up at him. “Of course I said all the wrong things, Stephen. Wasn’t it dreadful of me?” His mother might be vague and aimless, incapable of any reasonable thought, but she was his mother and he adored her. Now he laughed, and kissed her hand.

“You always do, mater, so what’s the odds? You wouldn’t be you if you didn’t.”

“No, I suppose I shouldn’t,” she agreed. “Do you like me as I am, darling?”

“Yes. Who was the alarming woman?”

“Oh, not Elizabeth, Stephen! Miss Arden. Her skirt dipped at the back and she said you were a charming young man.”

“Well, that ought to have pleased you,” he pointed out.

“No, darling, not at all. No one but myself ought to know that you’re charming. Where was I?”

“You said Miss Arden alarmed you.”

Mrs. Ramsay put down her tea-cup.