Cosimo left slowly. He felt a brute. He couldn't have told why, but it seemed to him that, by comparison with this brave girl, who preferred the sharpest pains of knowledge to the lethargy of ignorance, and would have the truth though it were a blade in her lonely breast, he was inferior and a coward. But for all that, Amory had been quite wrong in thinking he had changed. He had not. He still thought Amory splendid. And not only that: he hadn't quite realized before how very pretty she was. He had known she was pretty, but not how pretty; perhaps she hadn't been quite so pretty before?... And now Cosimo came to think of it, he had been noticing lately whether girls were pretty or not. Somehow Pattie Wynn-Jenkins had got him into the way of it. Pattie, whose father's plantation adjoined the western boundary of the grazing that was now Cosimo's own, was pretty herself, and seemed to raise the question.... Still, Cosimo had _not_ changed. He could admire Pattie without in the least taking away from the devotion he owed to Amory. And as for anything else than mere prettiness, Pattie wasn't in it. Pattie would never have dreamed of reading Weiniger and Tchekoff. Just at present she cared for nothing in the world so much as how she should reduce her golf handicap. It was hard to call a girl so pretty as Pattie a fool, but, not to mince matters, that was about the long and the short of it.... And, on the whole, Cosimo was rather glad that Amory didn't suspect there was such a girl as Pattie in existence. Cosimo half expected to find Amory still in bed when he went round to Cheyne Walk at ten o'clock on the following morning; but she was dressed and ready for going out. He was lucky, she said, to have caught her; she would have been off in another five minutes.--"Off where?" Cosimo asked. Oh, Amory didn't know.--"All right, come along," he said. But when she turned her eyes slowly round to his he saw that the night had only set higher their clear courage. Again he could not have told why he felt guilty. "Do you think it would be wise?" she asked gravely. "Why not?" he asked, taken aback anew. "Oh, very well," she answered indifferently. "I'm ready."