respectfully as a layman will always listen to technicalities. She did
not know that the whole thing was a fabrication; in spite of his warning
about his lying she had naturally thought that, if he should lie to her
at all it would be about drinking and not about everyday affairs. And
he, carried away by his imagination and his desire to impress her,
scarcely realized what he was doing.

Marcella was very bad for him; her courteous belief in him encouraged
him to deceive her; he thought she was rather silly; any other girl
would have chaffed him, have capped his tales by others, obviously
"tall" as Violet had done until he had sickened her entirely; but to
Marcella's Keltic imagination there was nothing incredible in his gory,
gorgeous exploits; was not she, herself, the daughter of a faraway
spaewife who could slide down moonbeams and ride on the breasts of
snowflakes? And was not she herself a fighter of windmills? To her
Romance could not come in too brightly-coloured garb, and so her Romance
wove a net about him. Sometimes it flattered: sometimes it amused:
sometimes it gave a sense of kinship that made him think that, unless
she were a liar she would never have so sympathized with him. He was
unable to trace the fine distinction in veracity between describing a
perfectly fictitious operation performed by oneself, and in recounting
the messages given by the screaming gulls, the whining winds on
Lashnagar.

On one or two things she was certainly caught up sharp. His taste in
books showed a width of divergence between them that nothing could ever
bridge; seeing her with "Fruit Gathering" which the schoolmaster had
lent to her, he asked what it was.

"It's by Tagore," she ventured.