He was not clear in his mind why Aubrey had become an antagonist. The memory reiterating itself behind his words "... she thinks I'm going to marry her ... damn it...." was mysteriously finding outlet in an indignation neither against himself nor Henrietta, but against the unsuspecting Aubrey. Fanny listened to the new conversation, but Meredith was soon dropped. The sight of Mrs. Gilchrist grimly poised opposite her mother, became a part of the lure Aubrey exercised over her. He was the son of this hard-faced, domineering woman. To do something with him that was intimate would be a deliciously concealed violation of the mother's propriety. Fanny had always been intimidated by Mrs. Gilchrist's propriety. Embracing her son would be a sort of revenge. Without wasting time looking for reasons, Fanny felt Aubrey as an attraction. Her attitude toward him grew more intimate. She did not try to enter the talk but adjusted herself in the chair, placing her body so that the curve of her hip and leg were effectively visible to Aubrey. And while the others talked she assured herself of the plausibility of her ambitions. Aubrey was a great man and very famous and distinguished. But he was after all entirely human. He had written books and Fanny fell to thinking about them, about the descriptions of love-making which crowded the pages of his books. Aubrey was famous and therefore aloof. But the things that had made him famous--the love passages in his books, were not intimidating. She remembered them with gratitude. They were love descriptions and Aubrey had written them. Love passages were in fact all that Fanny usually remembered of her reading. Plots and characters escaped her. After she had closed a book there remained in her mind merely the scenes in which men had placed their arms around women and whispered after a succession of exciting adjectives, "I love you." This was due to the manner in which Fanny read. As a girl she had ploughed laboriously through a set of Shakespeare in quest of obscene passages. Her girl's eyes would skip with irritation the speeches that seemed to her extraneous until, caught by some "nasty" word, she would become eagerly interested and carefully digest the sentences preceding and following it. At fourteen she had discovered that the dictionary, stuck away in a dusty corner of the book case, was filled with many such words. Whenever occasion permitted she opened the big volume and poured intently over its contents, digesting with excitement the definitions of what she called to herself, the nasty words.