“My dear”--it had just slipped out of him like that, quite naturally, quite wonderfully--“if only other women were like you! To understand, I mean, just to understand!” “And men?” Miss Lamb had dropped the two words with perceptible unwillingness yet with just a touch of defiance, as who should say that she too, on so rare an occasion, must for once say what was in her mind. “Men?” the Duke had smiled. He couldn’t somehow think of this tall gentle girl as a woman of the same age as his wife. She verily quite charmed him. Once or twice, indeed, he couldn’t help but pity Leonora Mall for the way she had let life so quickly polish her freshness into that worldliness which he, for one, found so unsympathetic in women. “Men, Miss Lamb? And what, if you’ll forgive me, do you know of men?” “Enough surely, surely!” “But that sounds quite threatening! Have you, then, hunted men in jungles and caught them, caged them and watched them?” “But, Duke, wouldn’t I, surely, have been married by now if I knew nothing of men?” “Oh, well caught! But, Miss Lamb, you haven’t married probably just because, like all rare people, you’re--well, fastidious!” “Oh, I don’t know! Maybe. Fastidious is a long word, Duke, and I seem to have been waiting a long time, so maybe you’re right. But I don’t know....” “May I say, then, that you’ve been very wise? So much wiser than many quite sensible men, so much wiser than many beautiful women. I mean, to wait.” “But aren’t we all,” she pleaded, “always waiting?” “Some of us, unfortunately,” the Duke said grimly, “haven’t. I, Miss Lamb, didn’t wait long enough.” “But are you so sure, Duke?” She was pleading with him. They were alone. The music and the dance passed behind them. He met her eyes humbly. “Are you so sure you’ve waited long enough--I mean, my friend, for time to bring the best out of someone you love?” “But,” he’d cried wretchedly, “I don’t love her! That’s just, don’t you see, the awful mistake and pity of it all! It’s not that Leonora and I have quarrelled, but that we’ve each just found the other out.” Miss Lamb sighed: “Oh! Oh, dear! And why, why? Way back home I’ve wondered, you know, about many things. All this sadness in life! It hurts to hear this. It hurts me--for you both. Poor, poor Leonora!” The Duke said very earnestly: “Look here, don’t for a moment think that I’m being cruel or anything like that. Believe me, your sister loves me no more than she has driven me into loving her. Honest to God, Miss Lamb.” “You _say_ that! But I know her, Duke. My own sister! Go to her now, and you will see. I am telling you to go to Leonora now and you will find her crying for her lost love.”