She puzzled Bob. Because here she was, not married herself! He could not get away from that rigid and logical division of his--and of many other people's, such as Dennehy and the like. "I'm not a marrying man. Heaven help the woman who married me!" he said, in whimsical sincerity. She saw the sincerity and met it with a plump "Why?" Bob was not good at analysis--of himself or other people (though he was making a rudimentary effort over Winnie). "The way a chap's built, I suppose." "What a very conclusive sort of argument!" she laughed. "How's Godfrey built, Mr. Purnett?" "Godfrey's all right. He'd settle down if he ever got married." The theories came tumbling in through the open door. Cowardly theories, had they refused an opening like that! "Well, isn't he?" asked Winnie, with dangerously rising colour. Bob Purnett was a picture of shame and confusion. "I could bite my tongue out, Mrs. Ledstone--hang it, you don't think I'm--er--what you'd call an interfering chap? It's nothing to me how my friends choose to--to settle matters between themselves. Fact is, I just wasn't thinking. Of course you're right. He--well, he feels himself married all right. And so he is married all right--don't you know? It's what a chap feels in the end, isn't it? Yes, that's right, of course." The poor man was terribly flustered. Yet behind all his aghastness at his blunder, at the back of his overpowering penitence, lay the obstinate question--could she really think it made no difference? No difference to a man like Godfrey Ledstone, whom he knew so well? Submerged by his remorse for having hurt her, yet the question lay there in the bottom of his mind. People neither regular nor irregular, people shifting the boundaries (really so well settled!)--how puzzling they were! What traps they laid for the heedless conversationalist, for the traditional moralist--or immoralist! "Oh, I don't expect you to understand!" Winnie exclaimed petulantly. "I wonder you come here!" "Wonder I come here! Good Lord!" He reflected on some other places he had been to--and meant to go to again perhaps. "You're a hopeless person, but you're very kind and nice." The colour faded gradually and Winnie smiled again, rather tremulously. "We won't talk about that any more. Tell me how the chestnut mare shapes?" Yet when she heard about the mare, she seemed no more than passably interested, and for once Bob was tongue-tied on the only subject about which he was wont to be eloquent. He could not forgive himself for his hideous inexplicable slip; because he had sworn to himself always to remember that Mrs. Ledstone thought herself as good as married. But so from time to time do our habits of thought trip up our fair resolutions; a man cannot always remember to say what he does not think, essential as the accomplishment is in society.