VI



"My dear fellow, just as I'm settling down to do some work, Aunt Mary
comes along the passage; I know her step so well. And then it begins,
the old story that I have heard twenty times before, all over again.
You have no idea how worrying it is."

Frank laughed, and talked of something else. These discussions of
Sally's character and general behaviour did not appeal to him in
either a comic or serious light, and the havoc they made of Willy's
business hours did not perceptibly move him; he was full of his good
looks, his clothes, his affections, his bull-dog, and the fact that
his youth was going by, as it should go by, among girls, in an old
English village, in a garden by the sea.

Aunt Mary was a woman that a rarer young man would have been attracted
by; indeed the delicacy of a young man may be tested by the sympathy
he may feel for women when age has drawn a veil over, and put sexual
promptings aside. Her bright teeth and eyes, the winsome little face,
so glad, would have at once charmed and led any young man not so
brutally young as Frank Escott. It would have pleased another to watch
her, to wait on her, to listen to her rambling stories all so full of
laughter and the sunshine of kindness and homely wit; it would have
pleased him to note that she was gratified by the admiration of a
young man; it would please him to hear himself called by his Christian