But if anyone had described her as vulgar and middle-class six months ago. Good heavens! CHAPTER SEVEN The day grew too fine, as he said, for false notes, so the music lesson was abandoned, and they went to sit in the garden behind the picture gallery, a green sward with high walls covered with creeper, and at one end a great cedar with a seat built about the trunk; a quiet place rife with songs of birds, and unfrequented save by them. They had taken with them Omar's verses, and Evelyn hoped that he would talk to her about them, for the garden of the Persian poet she felt to be separated only by a wicket from theirs. But Owen did not respond to her humour. He was prepense to argue about the difficulties of her life, and of the urgent necessity of vanquishing these. He had noticed, he said, as they sat in the park, that she had a weak face. Her thoughts were far away; he had caught her face, as it were, napping, and had seen through it to the root of her being. The conclusion at which he had arrived was that she was not capable of leading an independent life. "Am I not right? Isn't it so?" "You think that because I don't leave father and go abroad." "You might go abroad and lead a dependent life; you might stay at home and lead an independent life." He asked her what offers of marriage she had had. One was from the Vicar, a widower, a man of fifty, the other from a young man in a solicitor's office. She did not care for either, and had not entertained their proposals for a second. "If you marry anyone, it must be a duke. Life is a battle; society will get the better of us unless we get the better of society. Everyone must realise that--every young man, every young woman. We must conquer or be conquered." Society, he argued, did not require a chaperon from her; society would, indeed, resent a chaperon if she were to appear with one. Society not only granted her freedom, but demanded that she should exercise it. As a freelance she would be taken notice of, as a respectable, marriageable girl she would be passed over. The cradle and the masterpiece were irreconcilable ideals. He drew an amusing picture of the prima donna's husband, the fellow who waits with a scarf ready to wind it round the throat of his musical instrument; the fellow who is always on the watch lest someone should walk off with his means of subsistence. Evelyn listened because she liked to hear him talk; she knew that he was trying to influence her with argument, but it was he himself who was influencing her, she dreaded his presence, not his argument.