"If there had been time I could have done something for her; she's a pretty girl, but you see all these things take a long time, and Lucy wanted an engagement at once. When we left the theatre I began to realise the absurdity of the adventure, and the danger to which I was exposing myself. I, a man of over forty, seeking the seduction of a girl of seventeen--for that is the plain English of it. We walked on side by side, and I asked myself, 'What am I to her, what is she to me? But one may argue with one's self forever." "One may indeed," said Rodney, laughing, "one may argue, but the law that is over us." "Well, the law that is over us compelled me to take her to lunch, and she enjoyed the lunch and the great restaurant. 'What a number of butlers,' she said. After lunch the same problem confronted me: Was I or was I not going to pursue the adventure? I only knew for certain that I could not walk about the streets with Lucy. She is a pretty girl, but she looked odd enough in her country clothes. Suddenly it struck me that I might take her into the country, to Wimbledon." "And you took her there and heard Evelyn Innes sing. And what did Lucy think? A very pretty experiment in experimental psychology." "The voice is getting thinner. She sang Stradella's Chanson D'Eglise, and Lucy could hardly speak when we came out of church. 'Oh, what a wonderful voice,' she said, 'do you think she regrets?' 'Whatever we do we regret,' I answered, not because I thought the observation original, but because it seemed suitable to the occasion; 'and we regret still more what we don't do.' And I asked myself if I should write to Lucy's people as we walked about the Common. But Lucy wanted to hear about Owen Asher and Evelyn, and the operas she had sung, and I told the story of Tannhauser and Tristan. She had never heard such stories before, and, as we got up from the warm grass, she said that she could imagine Evelyn standing in the nuns' garden with her eyes fixed on the calm skies, getting courage from them to persevere. Wasn't it clever of her? We dined together in a small restaurant and I spent the evening with her in the lodging-house; the landlady let us her sitting-room. Lucy is charming, and her happiness is volatile and her melancholy too; she's persuasive and insinuating as a perfume; and when I left the house, it was as if I had come out of a moonlight garden. 'Thy green eyes look upon me... I love the moonlight of thine eyes.'" "Go on," said Rodney, "what happened after that?"