She hesitated and, for the first time since he had been in the room, ceased for an instant to look straight at him. She only answered, still laughing however: "Poor dears--they were altogether too deep!" She evidently wished to convey that she had never known. Maurice was a little disappointed: at present he would have preferred her knowledge. But as he walked home across the park, through Kensington Gardens, he felt it impossible to believe in her ignorance. V At the end of a month he broke out to her. "I can't get over it, it's so extraordinary--the difference between your youth and your maturity!" "Did you expect me to be an eternal child?" Mrs. Tregent asked composedly. "No, it isn't that." He stopped--it would be difficult to explain. "What is it then?" she inquired, with her systematic refusal to acknowledge a complication. There was always, to Maurice Glanvil's ear, in her impenetrability to allusion, the faintest, softest glee, and it gave her on this occasion the appearance of recognising his difficulty and being amused at it. She would be excusable to be a little cold-blooded. He really knew however that the penalty was all in his own reflections, for it had not taken him even a month to perceive that she was supremely, almost strangely indulgent. There was nothing he was ready to say that she might not hear, and her absence of coquetry was a remarkable rest to him. "It isn't what I expected--it's what I didn't expect. To say exactly what I mean, it's the way you've improved." "I've improved? I'm so glad!" "Surely you've been aware of it--you've been conscious of the transformation." "As an improvement? I don't know. I've been conscious of changes enough--of all the stages and strains and lessons of life. I've been aware of growing old, and I hold, in dissent from the usual belief, that there's no fool like a young fool. One is never, I suppose, such a fool as one _has_ been, and that may count perhaps as amelioration. But I can't flatter myself that I've had two different identities. I've had to make one, such as it is, do for everything. I think I've been happier than I originally supposed I should be--and yet I had my happiness too as a girl. At all events if you were to scratch me, as they say, you'd still find----" She paused a moment, and he really hung upon her lips: there was such a charm of tone in whatever she said. "You'd still find, underneath, the blowsy girl----" With this she again checked herself and, slightly to his surprise, gave a nervous laugh. "The blowsy girl?" he repeated, with an artlessness of interrogation that made her laugh again. "Whom you went with that hot day to see the princess give the prizes."