"Well--more like a boy, somehow, than a girl. She doesn't care. She'll do anything. And she's plucky. If she's taken a thing into her head she'll go through with it whatever you say." "Yes, she's got pluck," he assented. "_And_ cheek." "Mind you, she's as good as gold, with all her queerness. But it _is_ queer, Mr. Ransome, if you're a woman, not to care what you do, or what you look like doing it. And she's so innocent, she doesn't reelly know. She couldn't do it if she did. All the same, I wish she wouldn't." She seemed to brood over it in beautiful distress. "It's a pity that the boys encourage them. Boys don't mind, of course. But _men_ don't like it." And with every word of her strange, magical voice there went from him some shred of innocence and illusion. It was, of course, his innocence, his ignorance that had made him tolerant of a Grand Display, that had filled him with admiration for the Young Ladies of the Polytechnic Gymnasium, and that had attracted him to Winny Dymond. Everything he had thought and felt about Winny was illusion. It was illusion, that sense she gave him of tenderness and of absurdity. Gymnastics were all very well in their way. But nice women, the women that men cared about, women like Violet Usher, did not make of their bodies a spectacle in Grand Displays. Little Winny, whatever she did, was all right, of course; but now he came to think of it, he began to wish, like Violet Usher, that she wouldn't do it. It was as a boy and her comrade that he had admired her. It was as a man that he criticized her now, looking at her through Violet Usher's eyes. And it was as a boy that he had cared, and as a man that he had ceased to care. In one night Ranny had suddenly grown up. Of course, it might have been different if she had cared for _him_. "What does it mean, the Combined Maze? What is it?" Miss Usher was studying her programme. The Combined Maze? That wasn't so easy to explain. But Ranny explained it. It was, he said, a maze, because you ran it winding in and out like, and combined, because men and women ran in it all mixed up together. They made patterns accordin' as they ran, and the patterns were the plan of the maze. You didn't see the plan. You didn't know it, unless you were leader. You just followed. "I see. Men and women together." "Men and women together." "Are you running in it?" "Yes." "Does Winny run in it?" "Rather. We run together. You'll see how it's done." Miss Usher thought she saw. * * * * * And they ran in it together, Ransome with Winny before him, turning from him, parting from him, flying from him, and returning to him again. Always with the same soft pad of her feet, the same swaying of her sturdy, slender body, the same rising and falling on her shoulders of her childish door-knocker plat. Winny was a child; that was all that could be said of her; and he, he was a man, grown up suddenly in a single night.