She felt she hadn't the strength to support being questioned, and in her turn have to embark on the explanation and defence of Wemyss. There was too much of him, she felt, to be explained. He ought to be separated into sections, and taken gradually and bit by bit,--but far best not to produce him, to keep him from meeting her friends. She therefore arranged a day in the week when she would be at home, and discouraged every one from the waste of time of trying to call on her on other days. Then presently the afternoon became an evening once a week, when whoever liked could come in after dinner and talk and drink coffee, because the evening was safer; made safe by Wemyss's conviction--he hadn't concealed it--that the dinners of maiden ladies were notoriously both scanty and bad. Lucy would have preferred never to see a soul except Wemyss, who was all she wanted, all she asked for in life; but she did see her aunt's point, that only by pinning their friends to a day and an hour could the risk of their overflowing into precious moments be avoided. This is how Miss Entwhistle put it to her, wondering as she said it at her own growing ability in artfulness. She had an old friend living in Chesham Street, a widow full of that ripe wisdom that sometimes comes at the end to those who have survived marriage; and to her, when the autumn brought her back to London, Miss Entwhistle went occasionally in search of comfort. 'What in the whole world puts such a gulf between two affections and comprehensions as a new love?' she asked one day, freshly struck, because of something Lucy had said, by the distance she had travelled. Lucy was quite a tiny figure now, so far away from her had she moved; she couldn't even get her voice to carry to her, much less still hold on to her with her hands. And the friend, made brief of speech by wisdom, said: 'Nothing.'