He had no mental picture of the girl to fix her within his view; he knew not, in fact, whether she was girl or woman.

She was to him just an abstraction, and Drake was seldom inclined for the study of abstractions.
His curiosity might, perhaps, have been stronger had Mallinson related to him the way in which he had been received at the house of the Le Mesuriers after his dinner with Drake.

When he arrived he found the guests staring hard at each other silently, with the vacant expression which comes of an effort to understand a recitation in a homely dialect from the north of the Tweed.

He waited in the doorway and suddenly saw Miss Le Mesurier rise from an embrasure in the window and take half a step towards him.

Then she paused and resumed her seat.
'That's because I come alone,' he thought, and something more than his vanity was hurt.
The recitation reached its climax.