In a place like Little Ticklington full of marriageable women, it was a very important asset. It played the part of a chaperone. No one could expect to marry a man whose heart was as steadily and obviously broken as Peter’s. It had never occurred to Peter to marry any one but Onoria. He had a pleasant income for a single man, reinforced by certain small cheques for his articles. He lived well under his income and his cheques went into the garden. As he often romantically said (when there was no danger of Onoria overhearing him), his ideas literally created flowers. He would never have confessed it even to himself, but he knew he was a great deal better off as he was. If he had had his heart’s desire, he would never have been able to get rid of it afterwards, and this was equally the case with the few quiet twinges in the direction of domesticity which had assailed him since. There was nothing in Elsie Andrews which led Peter to change this opinion. At first he thought her a nice, quiet little girl; then when she shot up into long skirts, and grew half a head taller than Onoria, he thought of her as a sensible young woman, who never said things before you did, and did not know what you had not told her. Elsie made no effort, conscious or unconscious, to attract Peter, and Peter (like many not very attractive men) was very suspicious of efforts made to attract him. Elsie was simply there in a pleasant, non-committal way, like a table napkin or a bottle of ink. She was useful in the garden and sympathetic at the piano; Samson liked her. Peter Gubbins did not very often grasp new subjects, but when he did his mind played upon them with the effect of a magnifying glass. It excited him to be told that he had compromised Elsie; he had never compromised any one before, and he was not quite sure what it involved. Was he expected to act upon it? Or would it automatically react upon him? Would the Andrewses mind? If they did, what form would their minding take? Fortunately there was nothing in writing. He remembered that he had once sent Elsie a picture post card of a waterfall when he was away on a holiday, but there had been no space upon it for anything but the briefest allusion to the weather. He hunted up old copies of an excellent magazine for which he had often written, “Answers to Gardeners,” to see if upon another of its pages under the heading of “Questions of Etiquette” there might not be some case which would throw light upon his own. But no one seemed to have gone quite so far. There was a suggestion that no man should propose to two girls at the same time, a feat of legerdemain perfectly foreign to Peter’s tastes; but nothing was said as to the circumstances in which you are morally bound to propose to one. Peter wished to continue to meet Elsie but he did not wish to be morally bound.