“Ah, but the old forms!” “Those are the most blatant. I mean the swaggering reproductions.” “Oh but,” she pleaded, “we can’t all be _really_ old.” “No, we can’t, Cornelia. But _you_ can--!” said White-Mason with the frankest appreciation. She looked up at him from where she sat as he could imagine her looking up at the curate at Bognor. “Thank you, sir! If that’s all you want----!” “It _is_” he said, “all I want--or almost.” “Then no wonder such a creature as that,” she lightly moralised, “won’t suit you!” He bent upon her, for all the weight of his question, his smoothest stare. “You hold she certainly won’t suit me?” “Why, what can I tell about it? Haven’t you by this time found out?” “No, but I think I’m finding.” With which he began again to explore. Miss Rasch immensely wondered. “You mean you don’t expect to come to an understanding with her?” And then as even to this straight challenge he made at first no answer: “Do you mean you give it up?” He waited some instants more, but not meeting her eyes--only looking again about the room. “What do you think of my chance?” “Oh,” his companion cried, “what has what I think to do with it? How can I think anything but that she must like you?” “Yes--of course. But how much?” “Then don’t you really know?” Cornelia asked. He kept up his walk, oddly preoccupied and still not looking at her. “Do you, my dear?” She waited a little. “If you haven’t really put it to her I don’t suppose she knows.” This at last arrested him again. “My dear Cornelia, she doesn’t know----!” He had paused as for the desperate tone, or at least the large emphasis of it, so that she took him up. “The more reason then to help her to find it out.” “I mean,” he explained, “that she doesn’t know anything.” “Anything?” “Anything else, I mean--even if she does know _that_.” Cornelia considered of it. “But what else need she--in particular--know? Isn’t that the principal thing?” “Well”--and he resumed his circuit--“she doesn’t know anything that we know. But nothing,” he re-emphasised--“nothing whatever!” “Well, can’t she do without that?” “Evidently she can--and evidently she does, beautifully. But the question is whether _I_ can!” He had paused once more with his point--but she glared, poor Cornelia, with her wonder. “Surely if you know for yourself----!” “Ah, it doesn’t seem enough for me to know for myself! One wants a woman,” he argued--but still, in his prolonged tour, quite without his scowl--“to know _for_ one, to know _with_ one. That’s what you do now,” he candidly put to her. It made her again gape. “Do you mean you want to marry _me?_” He was so full of what he did mean, however, that he failed even to notice it. “She doesn’t in the least know, for instance, how old I am.” “That’s because you’re so young!”