She had no intimate understanding of the deadly wrestle of the conventional woman with her nature which she was undergoing below the surface.

Perplexities she acknowledged, and the prudence of guardedness.

'But as I am sure not to live very long, we may as well meet.' Her meetings with Percy Dacier were therefore hardly shunned; and his behaviour did not warn her to discountenance them.

It would have been cruel to exclude him from her select little dinners of eight.

Whitmonby, Westlake, Henry Wilmers and the rest, she perhaps aiding, schooled him in the conversational art.