I very soon learned that in the matter of my reputed being in love he had done exactly what I had intended he should do--had whispered the news about the college. It required no further eavesdropping to tell me that; I felt it in the altered air. I saw the knowledge peering through the little scalene triangles of Miss Windus' eyes, saw it in the looks of sleepy and amused curiosity with which Miss Causton favoured me. The latter lady, indeed, sometimes positively alarmed me, for the glances I suffered when I chanced to enter a room in which she was at work held incalculable things, and I no longer dared to look at her own amused and supercilious eyes, her fascinating hands, or that foot beneath the hem of her dress, fine and slender as a violin. And with the least encouragement Miss Windus would, I knew, have sought my company, and, lacking an admirer of her own, would have eased her breast to somebody else's of all the things about love at large that she ached to say to somebody. I wondered, seeing them both, whether there was no middle way with women. The whole sex seemed to be divided into creatures (or rather a creature, for I set Evie apart) to be enskied by men, and the other kind, that a man might fly as he would fly a wild animal. And I am not sure even now that when these two things are found in one and the same woman they ever really shake down together. They seem to go on existing, independently, unreconciled, side by side. But Miss Levey was far worse. She always seemed to me to crave information, useful or useless, from a mere acquisitiveness; and I may say now that it was she who, later, first roused in me the uneasy suspicion that unless I was exceedingly careful I should find that I had undertaken more than I could well manage. She began all at once to show quite a liking for my company. She mislaid books in the room where I sat, got into difficulties with copying presses when I was about, and glanced up at open or closed windows too high for her reach, as if she felt a draught or the lack of air, it didn't matter which, and must suffer until somebody came to her help. All this had its rise in the idlest curiosity, unless, as I sometimes suspected, she had made a bet that she would get out of me who this imaginary _fiancée_ of mine was, and was determined to win it. One day as I saw her struggling with the blind cords in one of the window bays, and advanced to her assistance, she relinquished the cords, and then, as if to apologise for the trouble she was causing me, said, "Oh, thank you so much--you see I'm going to a dance to-night, and have a slight cold already.... You don't go to dances, do you, Mr Jeffries?" I answered that I did not, whereupon she said gaily, "Oh, you must learn! I'm sure you could find _some_body who would teach you! Then you and your partner could join our set--such fun!"