After luncheon, as they sat over their coffee, she had again asked an immense number of questions and delivered herself of a remarkable variety of opinions. Her questions testified to a wholesome and comprehensive human curiosity, and her comments showed, like her face and her whole attitude, an odd mingling of precocious wisdom and disarming ignorance. When she talked to him about “life”--the word was often on her lips--she seemed to him like a child playing with a tiger’s cub; and he said to himself that some day the child would grow up--and so would the tiger. Meanwhile, such expertness qualified by such candour made it impossible to guess the extent of her personal experience, or to estimate its effect on her character. She might be any one of a dozen definable types, or she might--more disconcertingly to her companion and more perilously to herself--be a shifting and uncrystallized mixture of them all. Her talk, as usual, had promptly reverted to the stage. She was eager to learn about every form of dramatic expression which the metropolis of things theatrical had to offer, and her curiosity ranged from the official temples of the art to its less hallowed haunts. Her searching enquiries about a play whose production, on one of the latter scenes, had provoked a considerable amount of scandal, led Darrow to throw out laughingly: “To see THAT you’ll have to wait till you’re married!” and his answer had sent her off at a tangent. “Oh, I never mean to marry,” she had rejoined in a tone of youthful finality. “I seem to have heard that before!” “Yes; from girls who’ve only got to choose!” Her eyes had grown suddenly almost old. “I’d like you to see the only men who’ve ever wanted to marry me! One was the doctor on the steamer, when I came abroad with the Hokes: he’d been cashiered from the navy for drunkenness. The other was a deaf widower with three grown-up daughters, who kept a clock-shop in Bayswater!--Besides,” she rambled on, “I’m not so sure that I believe in marriage. You see I’m all for self-development and the chance to live one’s life. I’m awfully modern, you know.” It was just when she proclaimed herself most awfully modern that she struck him as most helplessly backward; yet the moment after, without any bravado, or apparent desire to assume an attitude, she would propound some social axiom which could have been gathered only in the bitter soil of experience. All these things came back to him as he sat beside her in the theatre and watched her ingenuous absorption. It was on “the story” that her mind was fixed, and in life also, he suspected, it would always be “the story”, rather than its remoter imaginative issues, that would hold her. He did not believe there were ever any echoes in her soul...