The hard blue brightness of his eyes sent me firmly into my shell. He had light eyelashes that reminded me of our old white boar, whom I despised, as he did so precious little for his upkeep. Mr. Hardy’s bright stare was relentless, and not free from cruelty, though I felt that he gave me swift credit for all my good points—complexion, youth, silky shining hair, feminine lines. My inventory of men was equally comprehensive and penetrating.

In thinking of him in the years that have gone I know it was his unalloyed maleness that hurt me. He would appraise women in the light of the pleasure or service they could give him. He had no scrap of that understanding for which I was hungry. That perhaps is to be found only in men of more complexity, who have something of the mothers who bore them as well as of the fathers whose name they bear.

I could be “simply ripping” to Mr. Hardy if I let fly with one side of my disposition, and there was yet another that would also be tempting to him. A man who had sipped deeply of forbidden women would like thoroughly untried soil, so I sat down primly in the full bloom of conventional innocence and waited for him to play first.

“Well, do you like Sydney?” he asked, quizzically.

“The Harbor is lovely,” I breathed ecstatically.

“Well, well! You really are as young as advertised,” he remarked. “I expected you to be at least thirty, with knives in your socks. Celebrities are usually well on in years before they are known.”

He made remarks in the character of the fake autobiography, but that sent me as far into my shell as a winter snail, so he did a little putting to get me out again, staring with an expression of vivid interest and amusement. He was talking to one whom he estimated as without the defence of social savoir faire.

“How do you come to be putting up with the Old Campaigner? Is she going to see you through?”

“She is very kind to me,” I rebuked him.

“She’s not a bad old bolster, but you needn’t feel indebted to anyone for entertaining you. You ought to charge ’em. You’ve provided a lot of idle resourceless women with a new sensation.”

“More men than women have come to see me, and have given me luncheons and lunch parties,” I said, like a child.

“By jove! Have they? I seem to be behind the times. What stamp of callers does the old Campaigner most encourage? Poets, I suppose. What would you think of a poet for a lover?”

“The Lord preserve me! Common men, when spoony, are sickly enough in poetic quotation.”

“Well done, little one! I believe you could sock the balls across the net like a champion if you liked. What about Gad—the old egg, we used to call him.”

“Gad is a dear,” I said staunchly. “He is so kind to me.”