with people whom one doesn't want to be intimate with at home."

"Yes. I know all about that."

"At my age one has learnt to avoid not only such intimacies but many
others less disagreeable, but which at moments might give one what I can
only call mental gooseflesh. Is that aloofness?"

"I think it would probably be called so by some."

"By whom?"

"Oh, by mental gooseflesh-givers!"

She laughed, laughed quite out with a completeness which had something
almost of youth in it.

"I wonder," he added rather ruefully, after the pause which the laugh
had filled up, "I wonder whether I am one of them?"

"I don't think you are."

"And Ambrose Jennings?"

"That's a clever man!" was her reply.

And then she changed the conversation to criticism in general, and to
the type of clever mind which, unable to create, analyses the creations
of others sensitively.