And, I thought with apprehension, no negligible chance either! For a man may be young and innocent and grave and be entirely at the mercy of this very simplicity and trust. It is the woman old enough to be his mother, but not too old to have this shot left in her locker, who bowls him over. Lucky for him if a more contemporaneous passion already occupies his heart. VI "So," she said, her eyes far away, "there are those wonderful pictures." Yes, she would not hesitate to make capital out of his pictures too. "The mere handling, quite apart from anything else----" There again she had Jennie on the hip. Jennie might love his pictures merely because they were his, but Julia painted, knew the technicalities, would make intimacies, opportunities, flattering occasions out of them---- "There's one, just a few bits of broken white ruins with her lying there--he wasn't going to show me that at first----" But ah, her eyes had spied it out, and he had had to show it. "You've seen them, George. Now I ask you, _could_ any boy of eighteen possibly have painted them?" That too she had the audacity to claim--that he was eighteen when she wanted him to be eighteen and forty-five when she wanted him to be forty-five. Here again Jennie Aird was to be put in the wrong. It was to be an anachronism and monstrous that Jennie should love so widely out of her age. "Could he, I ask you? Doesn't it show? You were perfectly right when you tried to stop that flirtation between those two, George, and you're absolutely wrong in wanting it to go on now. She's no right whatever, and neither has he. Leave it to me. He called me Miss Oliphant, but it can be Julia in five minutes, and anything else I like in ten----" I did not choose to remind her again that she was leaving him out of the calculation. I had warned her once, and it comforted me to think that he was not quite so unarmed as she supposed against this sort of spiritual rape.... She went musingly on. "'Miss Oliphant!' ... But wait a bit. It was myself and Daphne Wade for it before, and then it was all sentimental association and stained-glass and church-music and because he was wrapped in dreams. Sentiment's all very well in its way, George, but give me Get-up-and-get. That's the cock to fight. Daphne euchred me once----" "Where did you get these expressions?" I asked her calmly. "----and she didn't get him either. He never knew the first thing about women. So here we are, with the situation an exact repetition of what it was before." "With Jennie playing Daphne's part?" "For him. Why not? If he's the same again he's the same again, isn't he? But oh, when I saw him this morning!... It was exciting and terrific! You've looked at a photograph-album you haven't seen for years, I expect, but the things didn't move about and talk to you and ask you how you were and show you their pictures----"