She positively yearned for Dicky to wake up. If this were poise, this moveless calm of his, this unvarying quiet and courtesy, this inability to be stretched even in laughter--Pidge felt she was ready to drop the hunt; also she was tempted to test out Dicky’s poise to see how much it could really stand.... India bored her, as well as America. Miss Claes could eat and talk at the same time, and drop neither words nor food.... A lone Hindu arose to depart from another table. Subramini helped him with his coat and followed him to the door. Pidge thought once that Subramini was about to spread herself on the doorstep and let him walk over her. Punjab didn’t rise in her regard. Pidge suddenly burst out into a kind of merriment that had nothing to do with anybody present. “It is because we’re such idiots!” she said brokenly. “Oh, I don’t mean you, Miss Claes. I mean myself and--_Mr._ Cobden. It is the way things are done in the world--so utterly silly. Why should we be strange and embarrassed, avoiding each other for days and weeks--when we should be more than ever friends, and----” Richard Cobden bent forward attentively. Pidge was turned from him. “You don’t mean, Pidge, that you fail to see a reason for this strangeness?” Miss Claes asked. “You----” Pidge stared at her a second in surprise. “There can’t be any sense to it, can there?” she said slowly. The other regarded her with a calm that irritated Pidge just now. Everything irritated her, Dicky sitting by, Miss Claes’ familiarity with Subramini, and the look of knowing and not speaking, back of the smile on Miss Claes’ lips. But most of all, peculiarly at this moment, arose in Pidge’s mind the two conflicting stories of nationality. “Did I hear you wrongly that you said you were English, Miss Claes?” she asked abruptly. “No, dear.” “But Dicky said you told him you were Hindu----” “I did. I am both. I am half-caste, supposed to unite in myself the worst of English and Indian.” Pidge burned with contrition, less at her questioning than at the bad temper that prompted it. The two women were ready to go, but Dicky wasn’t. “You seemed to have something to say, Miss Claes, to set us--to set me straight on all this,” he began. “You see, Richard, one cannot speak without being drawn in. I hesitated on that account.” “But I’d like to hear.” Pidge flushed a little as she watched him. Tara Subramini, still afar off, was engaged in words. “... My house in Harrow Street is just a symbol,” Miss Claes was saying. “To come into one’s house really should mean to come into one’s heart. You both have keys.... What was in my mind to say was that people in your trouble act as strangers for good reasons. If they cannot have each other--they sometimes rush to the other extreme to save themselves the pain of watching another come between.” Dicky Cobden essayed to light a cigarette. The match broke in his fingers. He did not try again. Miss Claes amplified without apparent feeling: