and yet not disfigured the dear little intense crisis either with
impertinence or with resentment, with any of the horrid notes of that
kind of acquaintance. He had taken no liberty, as she would have so
called it; and, through not having to betray the sense of one, she
herself had, still more charmingly, taken none. On the spot,
nevertheless, she could speculate as to what it meant that, if his
relation with Lady Bradeen continued to be what her mind had built it up
to, he should feel free to proceed with marked independence. This was
one of the questions he was to leave her to deal with--the question
whether people of his sort still asked girls up to their rooms when they
were so awfully in love with other women. Could people of his sort do
that without what people of her sort would call being "false to their
love"? She had already a vision of how the true answer was that people
of her sort didn't, in such cases, matter--didn't count as infidelity,
counted only as something else: she might have been curious, since it
came to that, to see exactly what.

Strolling together slowly in their summer twilight and their empty corner
of Mayfair, they found themselves emerge at last opposite to one of the
smaller gates of the Park; upon which, without any particular word about
it--they were talking so of other things--they crossed the street and
went in and sat down on a bench. She had gathered by this time one
magnificent hope about him--the hope he would say nothing vulgar. She
knew thoroughly what she meant by that; she meant something quite apart
from any matter of his being "false." Their bench was not far within; it
was near the Park Lane paling and the patchy lamplight and the rumbling
cabs and 'buses. A strange emotion had come to her, and she felt indeed
excitement within excitement; above all a conscious joy in testing him
with chances he didn't take. She had an intense desire he should know
the type she really conformed to without her doing anything so low as