"Oh, my dear!" said Kate, with a smile of superior knowledge; fathers were always like that. Eva exulted in the encouragement and the liberty, trying her wings, essaying her power with timid tentative flights. Yet she remained very young; her innocence and guilelessness did not leave her. She did not seek to shine, she did not try to flirt. She had not Anna Selford's self-confidence, nor her ambition. Still, she was a young woman, and since Jeremy was very often at hand, and seemed to be a suitable subject, she tried her wings on him. Then Kate Raymore would nod secretly and significantly at her husband. She also observed that Eva was beginning to show a good deal of character. This might be true in a sense, since all qualities go to character, but it was hardly true in the usual sense. Christine Fanshaw used always to say that Eva was as good as gold--and there she would leave the topic, without further elaboration. Well, that was the sort of girl Jeremy liked! He saw in himself now a man of considerable experience. Had he not grown up side by side with Sibylla, her whims and her tantrums? Had he not watched the development of Anna Selford's distinction, and listened to her sharp tongue? Had he not cause to remember Dora Hutting's alternate coquettishness and scruples, the one surely rather forward (Jeremy had been revising his recollections), the other almost inhuman? Reviewing this wide field of feminine variety, Jeremy felt competent to form a valid judgment; and he decided that gentleness, trustfulness, and fidelity were what a man wanted. He said as much to Alec Turner, who told him, with unmeasured scorn, that his ideas were out of date and sadly retrograde. "You want a slave," said Alec witheringly. "I want a helpmeet," objected Jeremy. "Not you! A helpmeet means an equal--an intellectual equal," Alec insisted hotly. He was hot on a subject which did not seem necessarily to demand warmth because he too had decided what he wanted. He had fallen into a passion which can be described only as unscrupulous. He wanted to marry clever, distinguished, brilliant Anna Selford--to marry her at a registry office and take her to live on two pounds a week (or thereabouts) in two rooms up two pairs of stairs in Battersea. Living there, consorting with the people who were doing the real thinking of the age, remote from the fatted _bourgeoisie_, she would really be able to influence opinion and to find a scope for her remarkable gifts and abilities. He sketched this _ménage_ in an abstract fashion, not mentioning the lady's name, and was much annoyed when Jeremy opined that he "wouldn't find a girl in London to do it." "Oh, as for you, I know you're going to become a damned plutocrat," Alec said, with a scornful reference to the dyeing works.