For never before had she touched or suffered a touch from a man, even a gloved greeting, that had not in some measure subtly repelled her, nor, for that matter, a caress from a woman without a reaction of faint discomfort.
"Was I in any actual danger ?" she asked curiously.
"I think not.

But it was too much responsibility for me." "I see.

Any time I wish to break my neck I am to please do it alone in future." "Exactly--if you don't mind," he said smiling.
They turned, shoulder to shoulder, walking back through the drenched herbage.
"That," she said impulsively, "is not what I said a few moments ago to a woman." "What did you say a few moments ago to a woman ?" "I said, Mr.Siward, that I would not leave a--a certain man to go to the devil alone!" "Do you know any man who is going to the devil ?" "Do you ?" she asked, letting herself go swinging out upon a tide of intimacy she had never dreamed of risking--nor had she the slightest idea whither the current would carry her.
They had stopped on the lawn, ankle deep in wet grass, the stars overhead sparkling magnificently, and in their ears the outcrash of the sea.
"You mean me," he concluded.
"Do I ?" He looked up into the lovely face; her eyes were very sweet, very clear--clear with excitement--but very friendly.
"Let us sit here on the steps a little while, will you ?" she asked.
So he found a place beside her, one step lower, and she leaned forward, elbows on knees, rounded white chin in her palms, the starlight giving her bare arms and shoulders a marble lustre and tinting her eyes a deeper amethyst.
And now, innocently untethered, mission and all, she laid her heart quite bare--one chapter of it.

And, like other women-errant who believe in the influence of their sex individually and collectively, she began wrong by telling him of her engagement--perhaps to emphasise her pure disinterestedness in a crusade for principle only.

Which naturally dampened in him any nascent enthusiasm for being ministered to, and so preoccupied him that he turned deaf ears to some very sweet platitudes which might otherwise have impressed him as discoveries in philosophy.
Officially her creed was the fashionable one in town; privately she had her own religion, lacking some details truly enough, but shaped upon youthful notions of right and wrong.