"No, I'm safe for a whole fortnight from another." "Then you leave me without an excuse, and I was just wishing I had none," said Colville. After dinner Mrs. Bowen sent Effie to bed early to make up for the late hours of the night before, but she sat before the fire with Miss Graham rather late, talking Colville over, when he was gone. "He's very puzzling to me," said Miss Graham. "Sometimes you think he's nothing but an old cynic, from his talk, and then something so sweet and fresh comes out that you don't know what to do. Don't you think he has really a very poetical mind, and that he's putting all the rest on?" "I think he likes to make little effects," said Mrs. Bowen judiciously. "He always did, rather." "Why, was he like this when he was young?" "I don't consider him very old now." "No, of course not. I meant when you knew him before." Miss Graham had some needlework in her hand; Mrs. Bowen, who never even pretended to work at that kind of thing, had nothing in hers but the feather screen. "He is old, compared with you, Imogene; but you'll find, as you live along, that your contemporaries are always young. Mr. Colville is very much improved. He used to be painfully shy, but he put on a bold front, and now the bold front seems to have become a second nature with him." "I like it," said Miss Graham, to her needle. "Yes; but I suspect he's still shy, at heart. He used to be very sentimental, and was always talking Ruskin. I think if he hadn't talked Ruskin so much, Jenny Milbury might have treated him better. It was very priggish in him." "Oh, I can't imagine Mr. Colville's being priggish!" "He's very much improved. He used to be quite a sloven in his dress; you know how very slovenly most American gentlemen are in their dress, at any rate. I think that influenced her against him too." "He isn't slovenly now," suggested Miss Graham. "Oh no; he's quite swell," said Mrs. Bowen, depriving the adjective of slanginess by the refinement of her tone. "Well," said Miss Graham, "I don't see how you could have endured her after that. It was atrocious." "It was better for her to break with him, if she found out she didn't love him, than to marry him. That," said Mrs. Bowen, with a depth of feeling uncommon for her, "would have been a thousand times worse." "Yes, but she ought to have found out before she led him on so far." "Sometimes girls can't. They don't know themselves; they think they're in love when they're not. She was very impulsive, and of course she was flattered by it; he was so intellectual. But at last she found that she couldn't bear it, and she had to tell him so." "Did she ever say why she didn't love him?" "No; I don't suppose she could. The only thing I remember her saying was that he was 'too much of a mixture.'" "What _did_ she mean by that?" "I don't know exactly." "Do you think he's insincere?" "Oh no. Perhaps she meant that he wasn't single-minded." "Fickle?"