Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/168

THE BETTER SORT had introduced him. It took time to arrive with her at that point, but after the Rubicon was crossed they went far afield.

 IV

" yes, she said you were engaged. That was why—since I had broken out so—she thought I would like to see you; as I assure you I've been so delighted to. But aren't you?" the good lady asked as if she saw in his face some ground for doubt.

"Assuredly—if she says so. It may seem very odd to you, but I haven't known, and yet I've felt that, being nothing whatever to you directly, I need some warrant for consenting thus to be thrust on you. We were," the young man explained, "engaged a year ago; but since then (if you don't mind my telling you such things; I feel now as if I could tell you anything!) I haven't quite known how I stand. It hasn't seemed that we were in a position to marry. Things are better now, but I haven't quite known how she would see them. They were so bad six months ago that I understood her, I thought, as breaking off. I haven't broken; I've only accepted, for the time—because men must be easy with women—being treated as 'the best of friends'. Well, I try to be. I wouldn't have come here if I hadn't been. I thought it would be charming for her to know you—when I heard from her the extraordinary way you had dawned upon her, and charming therefore if I could help her to it. And if I'm helping you to know her," he went on, "isn't that charming too?"

"Oh, I so want to!" Miss Wenham murmured, in her unpractical, impersonal way. "You're so different!" she wistfully declared.

"It's you, if I may respectfully, ecstatically say so, who are different. That's the point of it all. I'm 156