Page:HG Wells--secret places of the heart.djvu/181

Rh is something more to be said. Her intelligence is better than her character.”

“I don’t quite see what you are driving at.”

“The intelligence of all intelligent women is better than their characters. Goodness in a woman, as we understand it, seems to imply necessarily a certain imaginative fixity. Miss Grammont has an impulsive and adventurous character. And as I have been saying she was a spoilt child, with no discipline.... You also are a person of high intelligence and defective controls. She is very much at loose ends. You—on account of the illness of that rather forgotten lady, Miss Martin Leeds——”

“Aren’t you rather abusing the secrets of the confessional?”

“This is the confessional. It closes to-morrow morning but it is the confessional still. Look at the thing frankly. You, I say, are also at loose ends. Can you deny it? My dear sir, don’t we both know that ever since we left London you have been ready to fall in love with any pretty thing in petticoats that seemed to promise you three ha’porth of kindness. A lost dog looking for a master! You’re a stray man looking for a mistress. Miss Grammont being a woman is a little more selective than that. But if she’s at a loose end as I suppose, she isn’t protected by the sense of having made her selection. And she has no preconceptions of what she wants. You are a very