They were good enough friends to be silent together when they felt like silence. But those silences! At a certain point Wilfred’s heart would begin to rise slowly into his throat. There she sat a yard away, and so remote! He ached for her intolerably. Was this love? More like an insanity. Suppose she were to cast herself suddenly into his arms, would he know what to do with her? Would he not turn clammy? Did he ever know what he wanted? An insanity! Being denied her, he ached and burned. Burned, while he sat still and answered her cool remarks, coolly. Why was he forced to go on thinking and thinking about her in her presence? Making figments of her while the reality was at his side! Elaine herself never thought, though she liked to suppose that she did: all her acts, words were struck out of her, instant and bright as fire. How natural for her to despise one like him! She _did_ despise him sub-consciously, though they were good friends; her speculative glance often confessed it. That high air of hers was a continual challenge to his masculinity, and he dared not take it up. Wilfred believed that she was just a little higher with him than with others. It suggested that she believed he was a coward in the presence of women. In other quarters he had not been considered so. What good was that to him here? By thinking him a coward she made him a coward in _her_ presence. Yet she had singled him out, him, the insignificant scribbler, amongst a crowd of glittering young men who dangled after her. These hours that Wilfred spent alone with her had been specially contrived by her. Nothing happened by accident in Elaine’s busy life. In dealing with men, she enveloped herself in an atmosphere of high mystery. During Wilfred’s hour she never volunteered the least information as to how she had spent the other twenty-three. It tormented him unbearably. He knew that other men came to the house on other days. He had seen some of them springing eagerly up the steps. Well, and why not? He had nothing to reproach her with. She was always clear-eyed and candid. But she ordained how much of herself each was to have. An hour to Wilfred twice a week perhaps, leaving him to spend the others in torment. He suffered when he was with her; he suffered when he was away. His only moment of happiness came when _he_ went springing up the steps. Things had come to such a pass with him, he could no longer do his work. Why had she singled him out for even these infrequent hours? That he might talk to her. There was no secret about it. “Nobody talks to me like you,” she had said once, while her eyes flickered with unconscious contempt for the young man who was a talker. And Wilfred accepted it, hating himself. They sat in front of the fire talking like disembodied intelligences while Wilfred eyed her. After such a silence, Elaine said: “The trouble with me is, I don’t know anything.” “Hear! Hear!” said Wilfred.