"From that time I saw a great deal of them--or rather, as much of them as of any one, for I did more writing at that period of my life than at any other. I was still young enough to have the luxury of having something to say, or thinking I had, which is as enjoyable. Mrs. Richmond was really fond of me, God only knows why. And genuine in her affections as in all else, the ordinary barriers of time between acquaintance and friendship counted for nothing with her; and so I found myself, very delightfully, to be almost an 'old friend' of the family within less than a month! "Perhaps it was just this unusual development that put me in the wrong channel; for there were Fay and I, with the embracing presence of her mother between us, or upstairs about to come down--how often she was, carelessly, 'about to come down'!--calling each other by our Christian names within, perhaps, the fifth time of my seeing her! While there was another young man, much more often and with more right at Rutland Gate than I, who, I know now, could not have called her by her Christian name, nor she by his, until the moment came when he simply couldn't help calling her by it. And that, after all, is what a Christian name is for! Certainly not to be scattered about in casual familiarity.... What a feeling, not to have called her 'Fay' until, one day, I simply had to! It's an emotion I missed, with other things.... "You will find it scarcely believable when I tell you that I went there, for most of that time, just as much to see the mother as the daughter! I simply can't remember hoping, when I rang the bell, that Mrs. Richmond would be out or lying down, and that I must 'pretend to be amused' with Fay--a joke, by the way, not easily released by any of us in that pleasant house! Mrs. Richmond was quite right in trusting to her affections, as good people often are right; and she herself said once, 'One very seldom places confidence in the wrong people.' "No, this unfinished romance would never have happened if, several months before I met her, Fay Richmond had not been engaged to marry the Marchese Vitiali. It would not have happened because Mrs. Richmond was a sensible and practical woman, and because I was quite an ineligible young man, having no money, and, as she once remarked, only the most erratic prospects. "'And for a woman to marry a man who lives by his pen is as dangerous an adventure as to marry a man who lives by his sword,' she ponderously added in the course of this same conversation; which of course held no strictly personal quality in it, but had sprung, one afternoon early in our friendship, from her coming down and finding Fay and me in a happy mood together. "'One of the pleasant things that have happened,' she said embracingly as she came in, 'since this girl was clever enough to get herself engaged, is that now we can have ineligible young men about the house--can't we, Fay?'