because Denham showed no particular desire for their friendship. He
liked them well enough, but shut them up in that compartment of life
which was devoted to work. Hitherto, indeed, he had found little
difficulty in arranging his life as methodically as he arranged his
expenditure, but about this time he began to encounter experiences
which were not so easy to classify. Mary Datchet had begun this
confusion two years ago by bursting into laughter at some remark of
his, almost the first time they met. She could not explain why it was.
She thought him quite astonishingly odd. When he knew her well enough
to tell her how he spent Monday and Wednesday and Saturday, she was
still more amused; she laughed till he laughed, too, without knowing
why. It seemed to her very odd that he should know as much about
breeding bulldogs as any man in England; that he had a collection of
wild flowers found near London; and his weekly visit to old Miss
Trotter at Ealing, who was an authority upon the science of Heraldry,
never failed to excite her laughter. She wanted to know everything,
even the kind of cake which the old lady supplied on these occasions;
and their summer excursions to churches in the neighborhood of London
for the purpose of taking rubbings of the brasses became most
important festivals, from the interest she took in them. In six months
she knew more about his odd friends and hobbies than his own brothers
and sisters knew, after living with him all his life; and Ralph found
this very pleasant, though disordering, for his own view of himself
had always been profoundly serious.

Certainly it was very pleasant to be with Mary Datchet and to become,
directly the door was shut, quite a different sort of person,
eccentric and lovable, with scarcely any likeness to the self most
people knew. He became less serious, and rather less dictatorial at
home, for he was apt to hear Mary laughing at him, and telling him, as