"I suppose I’d better tell you all about it. I believe I meant to from the first. And yet there’s nothing really to tell. You remember when I was a child I always wanted to be in everything—at the head of it, as a rule. Well, I honestly have been able to help one or two people since—it’s the old childish vanity again, perhaps. There’s one special person I’ve met often, and been a little—only a very little—useful to; everything has combined to bring us together, interest, ambition, sympathy. You see, the man doesn’t trust women, but he trusts me—vanity again, I suppose you’ll say. Sometimes I make excuses; I say not at home, and then he goes away." She stopped for a moment. "Then a note comes from his great friend, asking some little favour, saying that only I can do for him the special thing that is just wanted at the moment, and so it all begins again. The man’s a hard man naturally, and I want to soften him. He’s more gentle than he was, and kinder. He doesn’t believe in anything; that’s another point. I wish he could meet you, or some one like you who has fought battles and found faith. I can’t talk about those things—I never have; I don’t think born Catholics often do; we’re lazier, perhaps, than converts. But he guesses what it all means to me, I fancy." Cummings waited. "I feel like a rat in a cage sometimes," said Evelyn passionately. "I gnaw a bar of my cage and make a passage, and then I’m put into another cage with stronger bars and told to stay there." "Come to the light," said Cummings. "Yes, I thought so. You’re overwrought and overdone. Well, I say to you as I should say to any other woman, ’Go away.’ Remember the accommodation muscles of one’s soul need rest just like those of one’s eyes. Their focus gets strained too. And there’s another point." He hesitated for a moment. This was hard to say under the circumstances, knowing Brand as he did. "Something about marriage. Remember that marriage garments have to be fitted like any others; they don’t always suit at the first trial or the last; but, unlike other clothes, you may neither sell them nor give them away." He turned away. His window opened on to a narrow side-street; a hawker selling decayed vegetables and flowers was calling his wares a few doors away. Children, playing hop-scotch on the pavement below, wrangled and screamed over the game. From the Western Road came the jar and clatter of motor omnibuses. Everything was noisy and turbulent.