restaurants at popular Exhibitions. I don't know why I did for this man
what I'd never done for any other, Partly, I fancy, because it never
dawned upon me that he could misunderstand me. Rosamond says I
idealised him too much, and that he's just the ordinary man and not the
tiniest bit of the Bayard I imagined him. I daresay she's right, and
that he may have laughed in his sleeve at my romantic rhapsodies.

All the same, I never can convince myself that he is a mere
fortune-hunter. Perhaps the very fact that I didn't make the smallest
effort to wrest him from Mademoiselle Croesus when he tried to make me
jealous seemed proof to him that he was no more to me than a caprice.
So, when we made each other an atrocious scene and I told him to go off
to her, he simply took me at my word.

The scene began with my telling him about my sort of engagement to
Aubrey Blaine--whom as you know, I was really nearer to marrying than
I have been to marrying anybody. And yet, as I tried to explain to
Will, I didn't WANT to marry Aubrey. Only the mischief with me is
always that I can't hold back with one hand and give with the
other. . . Will wasn't able to enter into my feelings about that affair in
the very least or to understand how, when it came to the point, I realised
that I COULDN'T sink to domesticity on seven hundred a year. Fancy
taking a house in Pimlico or West Kensington, or one of those horrible
places with a man to whom you have a violent attraction and consulting
with your adored as to whether you could run to three maids and a
Tweeny! The sordidness of it would be too disenchanting.

When I said something like that to Will, he flared up and we hurled
nasty speeches at each other, and finally he walked off slamming the
door--I used to hear that slam in my dreams sometimes--or it may have