After lunch I got Zoë aside and said as she knew all about SOCIETY and LIFE and LOVE would she tell me how the fascinating belles managed to refuse to marry men and retain them for QUONDAM LOVERS. I was ambitious for such possessions. “That’s the ABC. You must make each man feel that he has broken your heart, and but for some fluke you would have married him. That works like a charm, but of course it requires a little finesse.”

Four o’clock found Mr. Hardy and me together again in the flat. He may have been as great a rake as reported, who thought no more of cracking a woman’s heart than of shooting a partridge, a man of the London world, a society idol who had achieved money and reclame by comedies of sultry duchesses and adulterous clubmen—Piccadilly club-men—but with me he was an Australian and kept to Australian rules in the game.

“Such innocence! Such inconceivable innocence!” he would exclaim. “I should like to take you away and shut you up somewhere so that your quaint childish purity would never be spoiled, and keep you for myself.”

I was innocent. I had only intuition to guide me, but suddenly woman’s knowledge had come and I was ages old in rebellion, and I did not kindle because I felt that Mr. Hardy looked on women as being created solely for the delight of men. I often chuckled to myself to picture how incredulous Zoë or Edmée would have been that Goring Hardy found me sufficient entertainment for hours together. Zoë would have thought me on the high road to having my unseasoned heart cracked. She would not have guessed that I was offsetting exploitation of unsophistication by turning amour inside out to see the wheels of passion go round.

A fool is counted wise if he holds his peace, can be made to work by a woman if she is young and her eyelashes are long. Whirlwinds of sophistication won’t protect a man from gullibility in this respect. A woman has the advantage if she is equally matched in intelligence. To start, a man is an open book to her while she has depths that he does not suspect because some of them he will not concede to her. He insists that they are not natural for a woman, and it being impossible to fully cheat nature he only cheats himself.

Goring Hardy would sit in a big chair and pull me to his knee. Oh, Aunt Jane and Ma if only you had seen that I could sit there without danger to my virtue, because that issue lay in my own hands! Dangerous—perhaps. So was it to ride a rampant stallion in girl-girly skirts, but approximately safe with skill. I had come to like the kisses, but any further caress or familiarity waited on a release which I did not give. Automatically any infringement of my code would have sent me up and away startled and resentful, and Goring Hardy was sensitively aware of that.