They would sit in silence for a while. Then he would lean forward and whisper her name, and she would turn her head and look at him with surprise. “Yes,” she would say. And he would not know what to do in the unaccustomed situation; and, as he had over-acted in the restaurant to hide his nervousness, so would he overact now. Without any warning he would take her in his arms and kiss her awkwardly and say: “I love you.” It would be a horrible failure. Very likely it would be her first kiss, and she would have her own romantic conception of what a first kiss should be, and she would be angry with him for his clumsiness. The kiss will have given her no pleasure, and that she cannot forgive him. She will push him from her, will probably say: “Now you’ve spoilt it all,” for at these moments it is the ridiculous that occurs to us, and she would speak out of her recollection of book and magazine heroines, and he would try and explain, but she would shake her head angrily. “Leave me alone! Leave me alone! Can’t you see that you’ve spoilt everything?” And, when they reached her home, she would jump out of the taxi and run straight up the steps without turning to say good-bye to him, and he would sit back in the cushions reflecting dismally that in three days he would sail for India, and would not see her again for three--perhaps four--years. A good story! I would sit down to write it as soon as I got home, not waiting for the morning to blur my impression of her startled girlhood. And I should not find it difficult to end this story. While he was away he would write to her and ask forgiveness, protesting that he loved her, had always loved her, that he was sorry for his rudeness; and that, when he came back, might he hope--a trite letter it would be; but then, if it were anything but trite, he would be a writer of much talent, and that I did not propose to make him. No; he would write her an ordinary love-letter, and she, being an ordinary woman, would be moved by it, and, with the distance hiding her blushes, she would write, saying that she had been young and foolish, but was now wise, and would gladly wait for him. And during four years they would create slowly, letter by letter, an illusion of each other out of the enchantment of things remote. He would become her Prince Charming, and she would be for him a creature of infinite fragrance. And then, when they met again, she would find herself in the arms of a prosaic Anglo-Indian, with thinning hair, and he would find that a girl had become a woman, that her pretty features had grown petulant during the years of waiting.