Haven't you found that out yet ?" "Not in Trethgarten Square." Mrs.Lessing had managed to let him know during the day that her guest had been reared within the sacred pale of those first families in whom the choice stock of humanness is refined by being maintained at precisely the same level for at least three generations.
"In Trethgarten Square," Peter reminded her, "we are told that you settle your account just by _being_; that you manage somehow to become something so superior and delectable that the rest of us are willing to pay for the privilege of having you about." He would have liked to add that recently, no later in fact than the evening before, he had come to think that this was so, but as she hesitated in her walk beside him, he saw that she was concerned in putting the case to herself quite as much as to him.
"It's not that exactly; more perhaps that our whole thought about life is to live it so that there won't be anything to pay.

We have to manage to add things up like a column of figures with nothing to carry.
Perhaps that's why we get so little out of it." "Don't you ?"--he was genuinely surprised, "get anything out of it, I mean." "Oh, but I'm a selfish beast, I suppose! I want more--more!" They swung as she spoke into a broad beam of yellow light raying out from the library window, and he saw by it that with the word she flung out her arms with a lovely upward motion that lifted his mood to the crest of audacity.
"If you keep on looking like that," Peter assured her, "you'll get it." He was struck dumb immediately after with apprehension.

It sounded daring, like a thing said in a book; but she took it as it came lightly off the tip of his impulse, laughing.

"Yes ...

the great difficulty is choosing which of so many things one really wants." They walked on then in silence, the air darkling after the sudden shaft of illumination, the light folds of her scarf brushing his sleeve.