Mr. Pellew recognised the obligation first. "Offly amusin'!--young people," said he, claiming, as the countryman of Shakespeare, his share of insight into Romeo and Juliet. "Same old story, over and over again!" said Aunt Constance. They posed as types of elderliness that had no personal concern in love-affairs, and could afford to smile at juvenile flirtations. Mr. Pellew felt interested in Miss Dickenson's bygone romances, implied in the slight shade of sentiment in her voice--wondered in fact how the doose this woman had missed her market; this was the expression his internal soliloquy used. She for her part was on the whole glad that an intensely Platonic friendship didn't admit of catechism, as she was better pleased to leave the customers in that market to the uninformed imagination of others, than to be compelled to draw upon her own. The fact was that, in spite of its thinness and slightness, this Platonic friendship with a mature bachelor whose past--while she acquitted him of atrocities--she felt was safest kept out of sight, had already gone quite as near to becoming a love-affair as anything her memory could discover among her own rather barren antecedents. So there was a certain sort of affectation in Aunt Constance's suggestion of familiarity with Romeo and Juliet. She wished, without telling lies, to convey the idea that the spinsterhood four very married sisters did not scruple to taunt her with, was either of her own choosing or due to some tragic event of early life. She did not relish the opposite pole of human experience to her companion's. Of course, he was a bachelor nominally unattached--she appreciated that--just as she was a spinster very actually unattached. But all men of his type she had understood were alike; only some--this one certainly--were much better than others. Honestly she was quite unconscious of any personal reason for assigning to him a first-class record. Attempts to sift the human mind throw very little light upon it, and the dust gets in the eyes of the story. Perhaps that is why it cannot give Miss Dickenson's reason for not following up her last remark with:--"And will go on so, I suppose, to the end of time!" as she had half-intended to do, philosophically. Possibly she thought it would complicate the topic she was hankering after. It would be better to keep that provisionally clear of subjects made to the hand of writers of plays. She would not go beyond hypnotic suggestion at present. She approached it with the air of one who dismisses a triviality. "It seems Mr. Adrian Torrens is a musician as well as a poet." "Had they been playing the piano?" "Really, Mr. Pellew, how absurd you are! Where does 'they' come in?" "Oh--well--a--of course--I thought you were referring to ..." "_Whom_ did you suppose I was referring to?" Aggressive equanimity here that can wait weeks, if necessary. "Torrens and my cousin Gwen! Be hanged if I can see why I shouldn't refer to them!"