Dudley Leicester swore inwardly because there was an interval of a sob in her rounded speech. He experienced impulses to protect, to apologize, to comfort her. She became the only thing in the world. “And it’s because you know how bitterly you wronged me,” she continued, “that you behaved gloomily towards me. I wouldn’t have spoken like this if you hadn’t been such an oaf at dinner, but it’s up to me; you put it up to me and I’m doing it. If you’d played the game--if you had pretended to be cordial, or even if you’d been really a little sheepish--I might have spared you. But now you’ve got to see it through.... “But no,” she added suddenly, “here endeth the first lesson. I think you’ve had enough gruel....” “All the same,” she added as suddenly and quite gaily, “you _did_ call me a penguin in the last nice letter you wrote me.” He was by now so far back into his past that he seemed to be doing no more than “see Etta home”--as he had seen her home a thousand times before. It only added to the reality of it that she had suddenly reconciled herself to him after finally upbraiding him. For, when they had been engaged, she had upbraided him as fiercely at least a hundred times--after each of her desperate flirtations, when he had been filled with gloom. And always--always--just as now, she had contrived to put him in the wrong. Always after these quarrels he had propitiated her with a little present of no value. And suddenly he found himself thinking that next day he would send her a bunch of jonquils! He was, indeed, as innocent as a puppy; he was just “seeing Etta home” again. And he had always seen her home before with such an innocence of tender passion, that once more the tenderness arose in him. It found its vent in his saying: “You know you’ll catch cold if you let your hood fall back like that.” “Then put it up for me,” she said saucily. Her hood had fallen on to her shoulders, and in the March night her breasts gleamed. Both her hands were occupied with her skirts. He trembled--as he had been used to tremble--when his hands touched her warm and scented hair, whose filaments caressed his wrists. In the light of a lamp her eyes gleamed mockingly. “Do you remember the riddle with the rude answer?” she asked suddenly, “about the hare. There was a hare in a pit, sixty feet deep, and there was no way out, and a greyhound was let into it. How did the hare escape. And the answer was: That’s the hare’s business.” She had hooked herself on to his arm again. “What’s that got to do with it?” he asked thinkingly.