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----- {{wotdjp063.jpg}} || wings of the dove ||


had been but the beginning of that. Never in life
before had she so let herself go; for always before
so far as small adventures could have been in
question for her there had been, by the vul
gar measure, more to go upon. He had walked
with her to Lancaster Gate, and then she had
walked with him away from it for all the world,
she said to herself, like the housemaid giggling to
the baker.

This appearance, she was afterwards to feel, had
been all in order for a relation that might precisely
best be described in the terms of the baker and the
housemaid. She could say to herself that from that
hour they had kept company; that had come to
represent, technically speaking, alike the range and
the limit of their tie. He had on the spot, naturally,
asked leave to call upon her which, as a young
person who wasn't really young, who didn't pre
tend to be a sheltered flower, she as rationally gave.
That she was promptly clear about it was now
her only possible basis; she was just the contem
porary London female, highly modern, inevitably
battered, honourably free. She had of course taken
her aunt straight into her confidence had gone
through the form of asking her leave; and she sub
sequently remembered that though, on this occa
sion, she had left the history of her new alliance as
scant as the facts themselves, Mrs. Lowder had
struck her at the time surprisingly mild. It had
been, in every way, the occasion, full of the re-


[[63]]

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