As he revelled in my innocence I grew more and more unsophisticated before his eyes. This was easy because I was genuinely blindfolded by INEXPERIENCE. Simple silence or to hang my head when in doubt had the desired result. I sat muffled in modesty: there was no chink through which a breeze of illicit amour could make its way. He would ask me what I was thinking. I withheld that I was pondering the monotony of such procedure, which could lead to nothing but consummation, and that was out of the question to me. Then, would there come only monotony and satiety again? Disillusion. Must one become drunk to find rapture in amour, or remain without illusion? It appeared so from what evidence I could garner, and that was a fatiguing thought to me.

If, in trying to usurp the maternal rights of the race as well as their own, men have accentuated the simple eternal feminine until it is cloying and infernal, no less have they made over-virilised masculinity equally infernal, crude and repellent.

“Haven’t you any feeling? Are you made of ice? Are you anything of a woman or are you only a spirit?” he would demand, kissing my arm. I watched the aforesaid wheels turning, my innocence outwardly intensifying, quietly, easily self-contained. My attitude and very tone of voice had been ingrafted by generations of conventionalised, continent mothers who had swallowed the prescriptions laid down for them by men instead of developing themselves in the exercise of natural law, and with nothing to ease their lot but the superstition that the impositions foisted upon them had been God’s will.

He would sometimes lay out a fairy tale. I was to go to London and have a retreat where he and I would work. How baffled I felt by INEXPERIENCE. It bound me like a cocoon. I imagined how Edmée would revel in like case, how histrionically she would handle it. All Sydney would know that Goring Hardy had been madly in love with her, that he had kidnapped her and shut her up with him while hostesses had been expecting them and suffering the ruin of parties by their absence. Everyone would know that her heart too had been just a little touched, and she would achieve glamour.

Whereas I did not get the enjoyment to which I was entitled because I did not know how to handle the situation and feared that Goring Hardy was regarding me as he might have a chorus girl or a social inferior who would be on all fours by his patronage. However, when you don’t know what to do, do nothing. If a young woman in her teens wishes to pile on innocence one of the surest recipes is to murmur something about MOTHER. I said I did not think my mother would let me go to London. That shooed him off those suggestions.

“I wish to God I could marry you,” he would say vehemently, “but I can’t afford to.” He would be imploring, heated and almost angry by turns at what he called my iciness.