And yet this dinner was for him certainly a big occasion. She meant something to him. But what? It was possible, of course, that he was in love with her, and not she with him. But that was no cause for shyness. Courtship is a leisured and, on the whole, pleasant business; and surely the young man was not so foolish as to be contemplating a premature proposal on the way home. For there is nothing more fatal than a hurried courtship. A moment comes when a girl expects a man to take her by the hand and tell her that he loves her, and would be angry with him if he did not. But it is disastrous to anticipate a climax. And this the young man knows; being a man of thirty such moments must have often come to him before. “And yet, perhaps,” I said to myself, “he is contemplating this folly. Why?” And, putting down my glass, I began to frame a story. He had been an officer in the war, and after demobilisation had gone up to Oxford to take his degree. That was quite possible, and would make him twenty-eight years old to-day. Yes, he had gone up to Oxford, and had decided to go in for the Civil Service; he had wanted a post in the Home Civil, but he had not been able to make up for the years he had lost during the war, and he had passed into the Indian Civil. In a fortnight he would go abroad for several years, and there was this girl whom he had met perhaps at tennis, and with whom he had fallen in love, fascinated by her delicacy, her frail grace, her suggestion of the butterfly. She was young and inexperienced, and had regarded his love as comradeship, for he was undemonstrative, and talked about dancing and the cricket championship; and now he was going away. He had asked her out to dinner, and was desperately anxious to bring things to a head before he went. And of all this she knew nothing. An interesting situation that could be developed into a good story. In the man’s failure to pass into the Home Civil Service there would be just a hint of the sad position of the ex-soldier; he had served, and had been passed over in favour of someone who had not. And on this failure hung the significance of his romance. He had prepared himself for a slow, quiet courtship, and now found that he had to compress into a few days the campaign of several months--and, of course, he had not been able to. He was not the man to capture a young girl’s heart by storm. If he succeeded in making her fall in love with him, it would be only after many weeks of growing intimacy. She would begin by confiding in him--that would be the first step; and then--but it would be a slow business, and, at any rate, it was impossible now. In three days he would have to go to India. It was really a capital story, and I began to plan it out: the meeting at a tennis tournament; the news of his failure at the exam.; the dinner party in the restaurant; and then the journey home in the taxi. I could see it so clearly.