He laughed more than ever.

"Oh yes, beautiful, beautiful. They're to do it in their evenings, are
they? And when they're faint and weary with their day's work?" And he
laughed again quite loud, laughed till Mrs. Moon woke out of a doze and
started as if this world had come to an end and another one had begun. He
was very sorry, and he begged a thousand pardons; but, really, that
passage was unspeakably funny. He didn't know that Miss Cursiter had such
a rich vein of humour in her. For the life of her Miss Quincey could not
see what there was to laugh at, nor why she should be teased about
Tennyson and bantered on the subject of Browning; but she enjoyed it all
the same. He was so young; he was like a big schoolboy throwing stones
into the living wells of literature and watching for the splash; it did
her good to look at him. So she looked, smiling her starved smile and
snatching a fearful joy from his profane conversation.

There were moments when she asked herself how he came to be there at all;
he was so out-of-place somehow. The Moons and Quinceys denounced him as a
stranger and intruder; the very chairs and tables had memories,
associations that rejected him; everything in the room suggested the same
mystic antagonism; it was as if Mrs. Moon and all her household gods were
in league against him. Oddly enough this attitude of theirs heightened
her sense of intimacy with him, made him hers and no one else's for the
time. The pleasure she took in his society had some of the peculiar
private ecstasy of sin.

And Mrs. Moon wondered what the young man was going to charge for that
little visit; and what the total of his account would be. She said that
if Juliana didn't give him a hint, she would be obliged to speak to him