She thought her world into acceptable shape and held it there by the simple process of ignoring the eccentricities of its axis.
Peter would have admired, if his unsophistication had allowed him, the facility with which she made it revolve now about their mutual pursuit of Eunice through the rattle and cheapness of what was known as "the Burton Henderson set." As it was against just such social inconsequence that Peter felt himself strong to defend her, he fell easily into the key of crediting the girl's sudden, bewildering flight to it as a mere midsummer madness.
"It's the way with girls, I fancy," Mrs.Goodward had said to him, strolling up and down the hotel veranda where through the wide French windows they had glimpses of Eunice whirling away on the ice polished floor of the ballroom within; "they cling the more to gayety as they see the graver things of life bearing down upon them." "You think she sees that ?" "Ah, there's much a mother sees, Mr.Weatheral----" "You would, of course," he accepted.
"It's a woman's part, seeing; there's an instinct in us not to see too soon." She gave him the benefit of her sweet weighted smile.
Peter lived greatly on these things.

He was so sure of himself, of the reality and strength of his passion; he had a feeling of its being quite enough for them to go on, an inexhaustible, fairy capital out of which almost anything that Eunice Goodward desired might be drawn.

It was fortunate that he found his passion so self-sufficing, for there was little enough that Eunice afforded it by way of sustenance.

For a week he no more than kept in sight of her in the inevitable summer round; he did not dance and the game of cards he could play was gauged to what Ellen could manage in an occasional quiet evening at the Lessings'.
"I suppose," Eunice had said to him on an occasion when he had known enough to decline an invitation for an afternoon's play to which Burton Henderson was carrying her away, "that the stakes we play for aren't any temptation to _you_." "I think that they're out of proportion to the trouble you have to be at to win them." "Oh, if you don't care for the game----" "I don't." And then casting about for a phrase that explained him more happily, "Put it that I like to cut out my job and go to it." She gave him a quick, condoning flash of laughter; the phrase was Lessing's and out of her recognition of it he drew, loverlike, that assurance of common understanding so dear to lovers.

"Put it," he ventured further, "that I don't like to see myself balked of the prize by the way the cards are dealt." "Ah, but that's what makes it a game.