"Well--it's something like this, if I can put the case. Take somebody you've just met and spoken to...." But Mr. Pellew's prudence became suddenly aware of a direction in which the conversation might drift, and he pulled up short. If he pushed on rashly, how avoid an entanglement of himself in a personal discussion? If his introduction to this lady had been days old, instead of merely hours, there would have been no quicksands ahead. He felt proud of his astuteness in dealing with a wily sex. Only he shouldn't have been so transparent. All that the lady had to do was to change the subject of the conversation with venomous decision, and she did it. "What a beautiful dark green fritillary!" said she. "I hope you care for butterflies, Mr. Pellew. I simply dote on them." She was conscious of indebtedness for this to her sister Lilian. Never mind!--Lilian was married now, and had no further occasion to be enchanting. A sister might borrow a cast-off. Its effect was to make the gentleman clearly alive to the fact that she knew exactly why he had stopped short. But Miss Smith-Dickenson did _not_ say to Mr. Pellew:--"I am perfectly well aware that you, sir, see danger ahead--danger of a delicate discussion of the difference _our_ short acquaintance would have made to me if I had heard this morning that _you_ were shot overnight. Pray understand that I discern in this nothing but restless male vanity, always on the alert to save its owner--or slave--from capture or entanglement by dangerous single women with no property. You would have been perfectly safe in my hands, even if your recommendations as an Adonis had been less equivocal." She said no such thing. But something or other--can it have been the jump to that butterfly?--made Mr. Pellew conscious that if she _had_ worded a thought of the kind, it would have been just like a female of her sort. Because he wasn't going to end up that she wouldn't have been so very far wrong. A name ought to be invented for these little ripples of human intercourse, that are hardly to be called embarrassments, seeing that their _monde_ denies their existence. We do not believe it is only nervous and imaginative folk that are affected by them. The most prosaic of mankind keeps a sort of internal or subjective diary of contemporary history, many of whose entries run on such events, and are so very unlike what their author said at the time.