“I cannot marry you, but by jove, how I wish I could,” he would repeat, speaking as if to marry me he would only have to ask. I might have succumbed if he had invited me inside a wedding ring, but I knew, young and inexperienced though I was, that it would never work, and no man living could have tempted me outside a wedding ring. I had been so reared that any other suggestion was so deadly an insult that it iced any emotion I might have had.

On one occasion when he repeated his refrain I murmured, “Perhaps it would not make anyone happy to marry you. Someone told me you are a terrible flirt.”

“The Old Campaigner, I suppose,” he sneered.

“No, she thinks you a very distinguished man.”

“Then, who was it?”

“It’s in the air, from all the society women; they say you are a rake.”

He flared into sentiments ignoble before an unsophisticated girl, so defenceless that he could say, “I’m sorry I can’t marry you,” to her face without fear of being snubbed.

He said women were a pack of cats, only that was a politer word than he used. I said nothing at all. When the first fury passed he said women had no call to talk about men, that a woman’s whole aim in life was to chase some poor devil and trap him into having to slave for her for ever after.

I thought this cowardly inconsistency seeing that women were compelled to marry by nearly all other occupations being closed to them, and by the pressure of public opinion. Men want it both ways like a bully arranging a game.

Mr. Hardy continued that there wasn’t one woman of all the pack, who, if she had the chance without being found out, would not have taken a swifter gait than he had, and that it was typical of feminine treachery for them to betray him to me; but I thought it loyal on their part to warn me.

“What did you say to those low cats?” he demanded.

“Nothing at all. I thought I’d wait for your defence.”

At that he smiled wryly. “If you were an ordinary girl, I could make a defence, but all the things that satisfy other girls, seem to lose their value when offered to you.”

So this was an example of an uncrude man making love. He had been an artist in beating up his game. It may have been demoralising to the game, but perhaps EXPERIENCE cannot be harvested without some demoralisation. AUNT’S holiday was nearly done and I had my worries, so I said plaintively, “Are you sure that you couldn’t marry me—aren’t you rich enough at all?”

“It’s quite out of the question, little one. We must both marry money. Love in a garret and sacrificing one’s self for the lower orders is delirium tremens. The common people are not worth lifting and are the first to turn on those who waste their talents in trying to better the world.”