Terence guessed that from the men she knew, and by the way she knew them. She had evidently no instructive sense of a bad lot. A bad woman had that, and often added hatred to it; a good woman had it, and added pity. She had it not at all. He found consequently no compliment in the gracious way she had received him, and no seduction in the enquiring sadness of her eyes. Since the meeting was at Ascot, and she was exquisitely dressed, he tried all the frivolous topics he thought might interest her; then some of the serious ones which interested him. She seemed about equally bored with either, and he was surprised when she asked on parting, with a curious gravity of request, if he would come and see her. He saw her twice in town. She had named her day, but he had forgotten it and gone on another. So she wrote, finding his card, to arrange a meeting, and, after it, offered him another afternoon. Terence was on each occasion her only visitor, and surmised that he was not so by chance. Yet he found it difficult to account for the privilege. They seemed to have little in common, not even the tongue in which they talked. Both appeared to be translating their thoughts before speaking them. Terence felt stupidly ineffective, and wondered in what straits of tedium she might be living on receiving, a day or two later, an invitation to spend a week end at Wallingford, where her husband had taken a summer house. He hesitated; (to be desired despite such a show of dulness seemed almost pathetic); accepted, hoping that work would intervene; but in the end, went. He told himself that it would be outdoor weather, a house party, and he should see little of his hostess. It was outdoor weather; but the party had been arranged for pairing, and he saw little but his hostess. They spent the days upon the dozing river, and sat together late into the warm nights upon the lawn. He knew nothing about women, and did not understand their ways. Therefore he was gravely interested in the account she set before him of her groping soul. He had never imagined any conception of existence so out of touch with reality as were her beliefs. Her idealism would have discredited a schoolgirl's fiction, and she clung to it as though there were some merit in being deceived. Such determination to remain in the dark almost angered him. "But men and women aren't like that," he expostulated more than once. "That's what people are always telling me," she replied pathetically: "but why aren't they?" He hadn't, as he assured her, the remotest notion; his interest lying, not in what men weren't, but in what they were. He tried to impart that interest in her, but without success. If men were the brutes they seemed proud to be, she asserted vigorously, she didn't care how ill she knew them. But it was clear that she had higher hopes of humanity than she confessed, and it would have been clear to any one but Terence that those hopes were becoming centred on himself.