Beatrix liked him again now. They had reached the copse where the next draw would be made, and were standing in a corner at its edge. She stole a glance at him sitting easily on his tall horse and found him a proper sort of man, in spite of his lack of the finer qualities. Perhaps he did not lack them so much as his very ordinary speech and behaviour had seemed to indicate. She had pictured him taking a fancy to Mollie, and willing to gratify it in passing over the obvious differences between his situation in the world and hers. But his last speech had shown him to have found an added attraction in her not having been brought up in his world, and it did him credit, for it meant to him something good and quiet towards which his thoughts were turned, and not at all the unsuitability which many men of his sort would have seen in it. There was a look on his ordinary, rather unmeaning face which touched Beatrix. "I like you for saying that," she said frankly. "It's what anybody who can see things ought to think about darling Mollie. I'm sorry I said just now that you weren't really good enough for her." He looked up and laughed again, the gravity passing from his face. "Well, it _was_ rather rough," he said, "though it's what I feel myself, you know. Makes you ashamed of having knocked about--you know what I mean. Or perhaps you don't. But men aren't as good as girls. But when you fall in love with a girl like Mollie--well, you want to chuck it all, and make yourself something different--more suitable, if you know what I mean. That's the way it takes you; or ought to when you're really in love with somebody who's worth it." She liked him better every moment. A dim sense of realities came to her, together with the faintest breath of discomfort, as her own case, always present with her while she was discussing that of another, presented itself from this angle. She had been very scornful of Bertie's frank admission that there had been others before Mollie. But weren't there always others, with men? If a true love wiped them out, and made the man wish he had brought his first love to the girl, as he so much revered her for bringing hers to him, then the past should be forgiven him; he was washed clean of it. It was the New Birth in the religion of Love. Mollie represented purity and innocence to this ordinary unreflective young man, and something good in him went out to meet it, and sloughed off the unworthiness in him. His chance of regeneration had been given him. "If you feel like that about her," she said, "I don't know what you meant when you said she hadn't given you enough encouragement to make you take the risk with her." His face took on its graver look again. "I don't know that I quite know what I meant myself," he said. "I suppose--in a way--it's two sorts of love. At least, one is mixed up with the other. Oh, I don't know. I can't explain things like that."