The knowledge suited him like his own garment, as if it had been lying ready for him to put on when the occasion required it, and now became him admirably. He perceived it to be a proper male function to produce easily and with precision whatever utterly charming young ladies might reasonably require. He appreciated Miss Goodward's acceptance of it as she came down from the house bewilderingly tied into soft veils for the afternoon's drive, as a part of her hall-marked fineness. If she couldn't help knowing, taking in the car's glittering newness from point to point, that its magnificence had materialized out of her simple wish for it, she at least didn't allow him to think it was any more than she would have expected of him. So completely did he yield himself to this new sense of the fitness of things that it came as a shock to have her, as soon as they had joined themselves to the holiday-coloured crowd that streamed and shifted under the bright boughs of Maplemont, reft from him by friendly, compelling voices, and particularly by Burton Henderson, who played singles and went about bareheaded and singularly self-possessed. It was unthinkable to Peter that, in view of her recently discovered importance in putting him at rights with himself, that he hadn't arranged with her that they were to be more together. For the moment it was almost a derogation of her charm that she shouldn't herself have recognized by some overt act her extraordinary opportunity. And then in a moment more he perceived that she had recognized it. He had only to wait, as he saw, and he would find himself pleasantly beside her, and at each renewal of the excluding companionship, he was more subtly aware that it was accorded not to anything he was but to what she had it in her power so beautifully to make of him. So perfectly did she strike the key with him, when, in the intervals of the afternoon's entertainment they found themselves sitting or walking together, that he could not have imagined her to have been out of it, not even in a rather long session after tea with Burton Henderson among the rhododendrons, in which it was apparent from the young man's manner that she hadn't at least been in tune with him. It occurred just as they were leaving and served in the flutter of delay it occasioned to fix the attention of all their party on Eunice coming out of the shrubbery with young Henderson in her wake, batting aimlessly at the grass-tops with the racquet which he still carried. There was an air of sulkiness about him which caused Mrs. Lessing enigmatically to say that Eunice was altogether too good to that young man. To which Lessing's "Well, if she is, he doesn't seem to appreciate," served also to confirm Peter in the role which the effect she produced on himself had created for him. He at least appreciated the way in which she had made him feel himself the Distributer of Benefits, to a degree which made it almost obligatory of her to go on with it.