She put her hand out through the window. He took it and pressed it, but he never lifted his eyes to hers. A lurch back, a plunge forward, and the train was started. "Good-bye, Dick!" she cried again. "Cheer up!" Leaning out of the window, she saw him standing with his hands in his pockets, looking after her. He called out something, which she heard imperfectly, but it embraced the word 'fool,' and also the word 'serious.' She could supply a connexion for the latter, but travelled to town in doubt as to the application of the former. Was it to her or to himself that Dick Dennehy had applied the epithet? "Because it makes a little difference," thought Winnie, snuggling down into the big collar of her sealskin coat--quite out of place, by the way, in a third-class carriage. CHAPTER XIX A POINT OF HONOUR Mrs. Lenoir's boast was not without warrant; in the course of her life she had held her own against men in more than one hard fight. She admired another woman who could do the same. In her refugee from the West Kensington studio she rejoiced to find not a sentimental penitent nor an emotional wreck, but a woman scarred indeed with wounds, but still full of fight, acknowledging a blunder, but not crushed by it, both resolved and clearly able to make a life for herself still and to enjoy it. She hailed in Winnie, too, the quality which her own career had taught her both to recognize and to value--that peculiarly feminine attractiveness which was the best weapon in her sex's battles; Winnie fought man with her native weapons, not with an equipment borrowed from the male armoury and clumsily or feebly handled. Under the influence of this sex-sympathy pity had passed into admiration, and admiration into affection, during the weeks which had elapsed since she brought Winnie to her roof. Her ethical code was pagan, as perhaps is already evident. When she hated, she hurt if she could; when she loved, she helped--she would not have quarrelled with the remark that she deserved no credit for it. She was by now intent on helping Winnie, on giving her a fresh start, on obliterating the traces of defeat, and on co-operating in fresh manoeuvres which should result in victory. But to this end some strategy was needful. Not only other people, but Winnie herself had to be managed, and there was need of tact in tiding over an awkward period of transition. As a subsidiary move towards the latter object, Mrs. Lenoir projected a sojourn abroad; in regard to the former she had to be on her guard against two sets of theories--the world's theories about Winnie, which might perhaps find disciples in her own particular friends, the General and his son, Major Merriam, and Winnie's theories about the world, which had before now led their adherent into a rashness that invited, and in the end had entailed, disaster.