that you ever got it all at once, and I certainly didn't get it then),
and if I were to tell you that what struck me first about her was
something perverse and wilful and defiant, this would be misleading.

She smiled in her mature, perfunctory manner as she took the chair I gave
her. She cast out her muff over my writing-table, and flung back the furs
that covered her breast and shoulders, as if she had come to stay, as if
it were four o'clock in the afternoon and I had asked her to tea for the
first time.

I remember saying, "That's right. I'm afraid this room is a bit warm,
isn't it?"--as if she had done something uninvited and a little
unexpected, and I wished to reassure her. As if, too, I desired to assert
my position as the giver of assurances.

(And it was I who needed them, not she.)

She hadn't been in that room five minutes before she had created a
situation; a situation that bristled with difficulty and danger.

To begin with, she was so young. She couldn't have been, then, a day
older than one-and-twenty. My first instinct (at least, I suppose it was
my first) was to send her away; to tell her that I was afraid she
wouldn't do, that she was too unpunctual, and that I had found, between
nine-thirty and ten o'clock, somebody who would suit me rather better.
Any lie I could think of, so long as I got out of it. So long as I got
her out of it.

I don't know how it was she so contrived to impress me as being in for
something, some impetuous adventure, some enterprise of enormous