She was possessed to a full extent of the her qualities of courage, physical and spiritual, yet at that moment she felt a wave of curious fear, the fear of the idealist that she may not be true to herself.
The moment passed and she looked at him with a smile.

An innate gift of concealment, the heritage of her sex, came to her rescue, but she felt, somehow or other, as though she had passed through one of the crises of her life--that she could never be quite the same again.

She had ceased for those few seconds to be natural.
"What does that wish mean ?" she asked.

"Do you mean that you would like to agree with me, or would you like to be twenty-nine ?" He too turned his back upon that little pool of emotion, did his best to be natural and easy, to shut out the memory of that flaming moment.
"At twenty-nine," he told her, "I was First Secretary at St.
Petersburg.

I am afraid that I was rather a dull dog, too.