Then Dorothy came in, carrying in her arm a kitten with an injured paw. From her room she had heard it crying in Albemarle Street, had run out and for the last ten minutes had been doctoring it somewhere at the back of the house. Mrs. Verners was alarmed: Dorothy was still flushed with running, or, perhaps, with tenderness; her hair was riotous; she was thinking of the kitten, she had the barest curtsy for Sir Harry, she was far from being the great lady her mother would have had her in this moment of meeting with him. And he incontinently forgot that he was there on a sort of compulsion, he nearly forgot that it was his duty to like her. Emotionally, he surrendered at sight to a beautiful unkempt girl who caressed a kitten and, somehow, brought cleanliness into the room. “Good God!” said Sir Harry, his manners blown to pieces along with his hesitations by one blast of honesty. If they could have been married there and then, it was not Whitworth who would have been backward. All that was best in him was devotedly and immediately hers, and that best was not a bad best either: if he could forget London and his craving to be a figure in the town, a courtier and a modish rake, he had the making of a faithful husband to such a woman, satisfied with her, with country sports and the management of his estate, a good father, and a hearty, genial, eupeptic, hard drinking but hard exercising representative of the permanent best in English life--the outdoor gentleman. If he could forget--and just now he utterly forgot, with one swift backward glance at London women. What were they to her? Dressmakers’ dummies, perruquiers’ blocks, automata directed by a dancing-master, cosmetical exteriors to vanity, greed, vice, if they were not, like some he hated most, conceited bluestockings parading an erudition that it didn’t become a woman to possess. Whereas, Dorothy! He felt from her a whiff of moorland air, and a horse between his legs and the clean rush past him of invigorating wind and all the zest of a great run behind the hounds with the tang of burning peat in his nostrils and the scent of heather coming down from, the hills. It wasn’t quite--it wasn’t yet, by years--the case of the roué worn by experience who seeks a last piquant emotion in religion or (what seems to him almost its equivalent) in a fresh young girl, but his situation had those elements, with the added glamor of discovering that his duty was not merely tolerable but delicious. “Good God,” he said again, quite irrepressibly in the spate of his emotion, then realizing that he was guilty of breach of decorum, lapsed to apologetic amenities from which they were to gather that his ejaculations referred to the kitten. His polite murmur roused Dorothy to self-consciousness. “What a hoyden Sir Harry must be thinking me,” she said confusedly. “They are wrong,” said Sir Harry, “who call red roses the flower of Lancashire. That flower is the wild heather. That flower is you.”