"I know how to find the Pole star if I'm lost."

"I don't suppose that often happens to you."

"No. Nothing interesting ever happens to me," she said.

"I think you make a system of saying disagreeable things, Miss
Hilbery," he broke out, again going further than he meant to. "I
suppose it's one of the characteristics of your class. They never talk
seriously to their inferiors."

Whether it was that they were meeting on neutral ground to-night, or
whether the carelessness of an old grey coat that Denham wore gave an
ease to his bearing that he lacked in conventional dress, Katharine
certainly felt no impulse to consider him outside the particular set
in which she lived.

"In what sense are you my inferior?" she asked, looking at him
gravely, as though honestly searching for his meaning. The look gave
him great pleasure. For the first time he felt himself on perfectly
equal terms with a woman whom he wished to think well of him, although
he could not have explained why her opinion of him mattered one way or
another. Perhaps, after all, he only wanted to have something of her
to take home to think about. But he was not destined to profit by his
advantage.

"I don't think I understand what you mean," Katharine repeated, and
then she was obliged to stop and answer some one who wished to know
whether she would buy a ticket for an opera from them, at a reduction.