And after tea you would play singles furiously. For two hours you would try to beat him. When you jumped the net Mrs. Sutcliffe would wave her hand and nod to you and smile. You had done something that pleased her. To-day, when it was all over, Mr. Sutcliffe took her back into the house, and there on the hall table were the books he had got for her from the London Library: The Heine, the Goethe's _Faust_, the Sappho, the Darwin's _Origin of Species_, the Schopenhauer, _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_. "Five? All at once?" "I get fifteen. As long as we're here you shall have your five." He walked home with her, carrying the books. Five. Five. And when you had finished them there would be five more. It was unbelievable. "Why are you so nice to me? Why? _Why_?" "I think it must be because I like you, Mary." Utterly unbelievable. "Do--you--_really_--like me?" "I liked you the first day I saw you. With your brother. On Greffington Edge." "I wonder why." She wondered what he was thinking, what, deep down inside him, he was really thinking. "Perhaps it was because you wanted something I could give you.... Tennis.... You wanted it so badly. Everything you want you want so badly." "And I never knew we were going to be such friends." "No more did I. And I don't know now how long it's going to last." "Why shouldn't it last?" "Because next year 'Mark' will have come home and you'll have nothing to say to me." "Mark won't make a scrap of difference." "Well--if it isn't 'Mark' ... You'll grow up, Mary, and it won't amuse you to talk to me any more. I shan't know you. You'll wear long skirts and long hair done in the fashion." "I shall always want to talk to you. I shall never do up my hair. I cut it off because I couldn't be bothered with it. But I was sold. I thought it would curl all over my head, and it didn't curl." "It curls at the tips," Mr. Sutcliffe said. "I like it. Makes you look like a jolly boy, instead of a dreadful, unapproachable young lady. A little San Giovanni. A little San Giovanni." That was his trick: caressing his own words as if he liked them. She wondered what, deep down inside him, he was really like. "Mr. Sutcliffe--if you'd known a girl when she was only fourteen, and you liked her and you never saw her again till she was seventeen, and then you found that she'd gone and cut her hair all off, would it give you an awful shock?" "Depends on how much I liked her." "If you'd liked her awfully--would it make you leave off liking her?" "I think my friendship could stand the strain." "If it wasn't just friendship? Supposing it was Mrs. Sutcliffe?" "I shouldn't like my wife to cut her hair off. It wouldn't be at all becoming to her." "No. But when she was young?" "Ah--when she was young--" "Would it have made any difference?" "No. No. It wouldn't have made any difference at all." "You'd have married her just the same?" "Just the same, Mary. Why?"