“One did hear,” Mr. Best went on, his small, ruddy face taking on a look of retrospective reprobation, “that there was an attachment to a certain young woman--the tale was public property--only as such do I allude to it--a very fashionable, very worldly young woman. I was relieved indeed when the rumor came to nothing. He escaped finally, I can’t help fancying it, this summer. I was much relieved.” “Why so, pray?” “I am rural, old-fashioned, my dear young man, and that type of young woman is one toward which, I own it, I find it difficult to feel charitably. She represents the pagan, the Christless element that I spoke of in our modern world. Her charm could not have been a noble one. Had our friend here succumbed to it, she could only have meant disaster in his life. She would have urged him into ambition, pleasure-seeking, dissipation. Of course I only cite what I have heard in my quiet corner, though I have had glimpses of her, passing with a friend, a very frivolous person, in a motor-car. She looked completely what I had imagined.” “If you mean Miss Gifford,” said Grainger, trying for temperateness, “I happen to know her. She is anything but a pleasure-seeker, anything but frivolous, anything, above all, but a pagan. If Palairet had been lucky enough to marry her it would have been the best thing that ever happened to him in his life, and a very dubious thing for her. She is a thousand times too good for him.” “My dear Mr. Grainger, pardon me; I had no idea that you knew the lady. But,” Mr. Best had flushed a little under this onslaught, “I cannot but think you a partisan.” “Do you call a woman frivolous who spends half of her time working in the slums?” “That is a phase, I hear, of the ultra-smart young woman. But no doubt rumor has been unjust. I must beg you to pardon me.” “Oh, don’t mind that. You heard, no doubt, the surface things. But no one who knows Miss Gifford can think of them, that’s all.” “And if I have been betrayed into injustice, I hope that you will reconsider a little more charitably your impression of Mr. Palairet,” said Mr. Best, in whom, evidently, Grainger’s roughness rankled. Grainger laughed grimly. “I can’t consider him anything but a thousand times too bad for Miss Gifford.” They had reached the entrance to Cheylesford Lodge on this final and discordant phrase. Mr. Best kept a grieved silence and Grainger’s thoughts passed from him. He had had in his life no training in appreciation and was indifferent to things of the eye, but even to his insensible nature the whole aspect of the house that they approached between high yew hedges, its dreaming quiet, the tones of its dim old bricks, the shadowed white of paneled walls within, spoke of pensive beauty, of a secure content in things of the mind. He felt it suddenly as oppressive and ominous in its assured quietness. It had some secret against the probes of feeling. Its magic softly shut away suffering and encircled safely a treasure of tranquillity.