It remained for him none the less an extraordinary notion. “It seems to me surely that if her mother can’t—” “Ah little girls and their mothers to-day!” she rather inconsequently broke in. But she checked herself with something she seemed to give out as after all more to the point. “Tell her I’ve been good for him. Don’t you think I have?” It had its effect on him—more than at the moment he quite measured. Yet he was consciously enough touched. “Oh if it’s all _you_—!” “Well, it may not be ‘all,’” she interrupted, “but it’s to a great extent. Really and truly,” she added in a tone that was to take its place with him among things remembered. “Then it’s very wonderful.” He smiled at her from a face that he felt as strained, and her own face for a moment kept him so. At last she also got up. “Well, don’t you think that for that—” “I ought to save you?” So it was that the way to meet her—and the way, as well, in a manner, to get off—came over him. He heard himself use the exorbitant word, the very sound of which helped to determine his flight. “I’ll save you if I can.” II In Chad’s lovely home, however, one evening ten days later, he felt himself present at the collapse of the question of Jeanne de Vionnet’s shy secret. He had been dining there in the company of that young lady and her mother, as well as of other persons, and he had gone into the _petit salon_, at Chad’s request, on purpose to talk with her. The young man had put this to him as a favour—“I should like so awfully to know what you think of her. It will really be a chance for you,” he had said, “to see the _jeune fille_—I mean the type—as she actually is, and I don’t think that, as an observer of manners, it’s a thing you ought to miss. It will be an impression that—whatever else you take—you can carry home with you, where you’ll find again so much to compare it with.”