From this he sorted the few letters which it would be necessary to answer in his own handwriting, and laid them aside; then taking the great bulk, he planted himself on the hearthrug, with his back to the fire, and, cigarette in mouth, dictated to the self-effacing young woman.

She took down his words with anxious humility, for she looked upon him as a god sphered on Olympian heights--and what socially insecure young woman of lower-middle-class England could do otherwise in the presence of a torturingly beautiful youth, immaculately raimented, who commanded in the great house with a smile more royal and debonair than that of the master thereof, Member of Parliament though he was, and Justice of the Peace and Lord of the Manor?
And Paul, fresh from his retrospect, looked at the girl's thin shoulders and sharp, intent profile, and wondered a little, somewhat ironically.

He knew that she regarded him as a kind of god, for reasons of caste.

Yet she was the daughter of a Morebury piano tuner, of unblemished parentage for generations.

She had never known hunger and cold and the real sting of poverty.