“I should like it very much,” I said sincerely, for, since this revised version of my relations with Mr. Waters, there’s an end of any more complications for the present. It has been worth while sinking the small satisfactions of being “cattish” and making two-edged remarks to my employer. I seem, now, to have all the advantages of being engaged to a quite friendly and easy-to-get-on-with young man, without the horrible disadvantage of feeling it’s a permanency. Yes; I do like having the freedom of a man’s conversation and society without _arrière pensée_. And it seems to me that the only way to enjoy them is by being officially—that is, _nominally_, engaged to the man! In any other sort of acquaintanceship there looms the possibility of the “Real” engagement. All the time that the girl and the man are having what might be a jolly and unembarrassed conversation about really interesting things—not Love and nonsense—that possibility is being conjugated between them by some horrid form of Conscience or Self-consciousness. Something like this: “_I might fall in love._” “_Thou mightest fall in love._” “_She might think I was falling in love._” “_He might imagine I wanted him to fall in love._” “_We might both fall in love._” “_You might tease us about being in love._” “_They might say we were actually engaged!_” All this we—Mr. Waters and I—are spared. The feeling of it, which is there like a brick wall between almost every unattached young man and young woman, I know; I’ve felt it there between Sydney and myself, long, long before I knew he admired me. And this same wall—well, it’s not so much that it’s never been built, or even that it’s been pulled down, as that it’s not _between_ Mr. Waters and me, just because we’re sitting on the top of it and talking all the more comfortably for having climbed it together! Consequently, I really was pleased to accept Mrs. Waters’ invitation. And when she said further, “Billy won’t be able to join us for a fortnight, I’m afraid. Will you go back, dear, to this friend of yours you live with in London, and come on later? Or—of course you know we should love it!—could you come with Blanche and Theo and me?” I said, “Do let me come with you and the girls.” “That’s right,” said the Governor’s mother. “Then I shall write to Mrs. Roberts at the cottages, and tell her to have the extra bedroom in _my_ cottage ready for you.” “And I will write to Cicely Harradine—that’s the girl I live with,” said I. “And I ought to go up one day this week to the flat, and see her and collect a few things.” “Go up on Saturday, dear,” suggested the Governor’s mother. “Then Billy could motor you up; he would like that so much.” She has so many plans of this kind for me, fostered by this delusion that her son is always on the look-out for a chance to be alone with me. Of course it’s not quite the same kind of delusion now that it was a week ago.