meets with sometimes--creatures who are for ever on the watch to pounce,
and who are incapable of making allowances for any male frailty--smooth,
smiling creatures, with thin lips, hair a little scanty at the front,
and a quietly omniscient 'don't-tell-_me_' tone. Mrs. Alice Challice had
a mouth as wide as her ideas, and a full underlip. She was a woman who,
as it were, ran out to meet you when you started to cross the dangerous
roadway which separates the two sexes. She comprehended because she
wanted to comprehend. And when she could not comprehend she would
deceive herself that she did: which amounts to the equivalent.

She was a living proof that in her sex social distinctions do not
effectively count. Nothing counted where she was concerned, except a
distinction far more profound than any social distinction--the historic
distinction between Adam and Eve. She was balm to Priam Farll. She might
have been equally balm to King David, Uriah the Hittite, Socrates,
Rousseau, Lord Byron, Heine, or Charlie Peace. She would have understood
them all. They would all have been ready to cushion themselves on her
comfortableness. Was she a lady? Pish! She was a woman.

Her temperament drew Priam Farll like an electrified magnet. To wander
about freely in that roomy sympathy of hers seemed to him to be the
supreme reward of experience. It seemed like the good inn after the
bleak high-road, the oasis after the sandstorm, shade after glare, the
dressing after the wound, sleep after insomnia, surcease from
unspeakable torture. He wanted, in a word, to tell her everything,
because she would not demand any difficult explanations. She had given
him an opening, in her mention of savings. In reply to her suggestion,
"You must have put a good bit by," he could casually answer:

"Yes, a hundred and forty thousand pounds."