Whatever Caerleon’s inducement might be, he went on his way calmly, heeding neither Cyril’s lack of sympathy nor young O’Malachy’s scoffs, for he had now fully made up his mind about Nadia. At first he had been alternately attracted and repelled by her, but the repulsion had gradually faded before the attraction. The girl was so transparently honest, so sincere in her earnest intolerance, so unconventional in the way in which she persisted in testing everything by the standards of right and wrong, instead of those of custom and fashion, that the man who had turned in disgust from the artificiality of the frivolous or emancipated girls he had met in troops in London could not but hail her as a kindred spirit. It is true that she offended his taste and outraged his views of propriety twenty times a day by her decided utterances, but now that he knew what prompted these remarks he could honour the intention if he could not appreciate the result. And besides, she was softening, he was sure, under the influence of her friendship with him--he could not mistake the change; and it was seldom indeed that she addressed him nowadays with the abruptness which he had mentally stigmatised as _farouche_ on his first meeting with her. In the society of her own family, however, this change was not visible, and she was still rigid, severe, uncompromisingly plain of speech. In his character of candid friend, Caerleon felt it to be his duty to take her to task occasionally on this subject. “I wish,” he said to her one day with some trepidation, for he had suffered more than once in his self-imposed task of smoothing down the angles of this young lady’s disposition, “that you could think it right to leave off apologising when you have said anything unpleasant. You have quite dropped it with me, you know, but you keep it up with my brother and your own people.” “But you told me that it was worse to you than the rude things I had said,” objected Nadia, “and it is not so with the rest.” “No, indeed, they enjoy it,” said Caerleon, “and that is just why I hate it. Can’t you see that your brother and mine think it a good joke to stir you up to say rude things, just for the pleasure of hearing you apologise with a jerk the next minute?” “Yes, I see it,” she answered; “but that makes it all the better discipline for me.” “Not for me,” said Caerleon. “I think your system ought to take some account of other people’s feelings.” “But surely,” she said, “if I give pleasure to my brother and yours by acting in this way, I am considering other people’s feelings in doing it?” Her voice as she asked the question was not particularly cheerful, but Caerleon treasured up the remark in his memory as the first approach to a joke that he had ever heard Nadia utter. “Wouldn’t it be equally good discipline,” he said, “to stop before saying the rude things, and try to say something pleasant instead?”