She wondered, rather wistfully, whether this was because it was such a long while since she had had any opportunity of talking to a man other than her husband or one of his elderly married acquaintances. Her conversation with Morrison did no more than skirt the edge of personalities that were implied, rather than spoken. Yet when they parted Elsie knew, and knew that Morrison knew, that each was determined to see the other again. She travelled home in a dream, and hardly heard her husband’s vexed enquiry as to the reason of her lateness. Williams had always shown a very strong conviction that it was a wife’s duty invariably to be at home in time to welcome her husband’s return from business. “I’ve been to Hillbourne Terrace.” “H’m. You’ve made yourself very smart. That hat suits you, Elsie.” He so seldom paid a compliment that Elsie was astonished, and ran to look at herself in the mirror over the dining-room sideboard. It was the hat, was it? Her full face was softly flushed, and her eyes looked bigger and darker than usual. Elsie saw her own closed mouth break into an involuntary smile as she gazed at her reflection. She went up to her room singing softly. Two days later Leslie Morrison came to see her. “I hope you won’t think I’m taking a liberty. Knowing your people so well, it seemed quite natural, like, to take advantage of your kind invitation.” “That’s right,” Elsie encouraged him. She hardly knew what she was saying, but already their intercourse seemed to be on a plane where conventional interchanges of words were unnecessary. Although it was only the second time they had met, Morrison told her a great deal about himself, and Elsie listened, with a growing, tremulous tenderness. He went away before her husband came in, and Elsie underwent a momentary, essentially superficial, reaction. “I’m getting soppy about that boy--that’s what I’m doing! Just because he’s got a pair of eyes like--like I don’t know what. Him and Geraldine! It’s too ridiculous. Why, he’s younger even than me.” She reflected that if Morrison, indeed, had been a year or two older, he would certainly have kissed her by this time. But it was quite evident to her that such an idea had never even crossed his mind. He viewed her with obvious admiration, and with great respect. The next day Elsie bought a book of poems, about which Morrison had told her. She read some of them, and it seemed to her that she had a new understanding of a form of expression which had never made the least appeal to her before. “I’m a fool!” Elsie told herself in astonishment, but with an ominous sensation of strange, new emotions, softer than any she had yet known, taking possession of her life. She felt that she would like to give the book to Morrison as a present, but they had made no definite arrangement for meeting again, and she could not bring herself to send it by post. Restlessness possessed her.