On this and on the succeeding days she discovered a subtle change in Quixtus’s attitude towards her. His manner had grown, if possible, more courteous; it betrayed a more delicate admiration, a more graceful homage to the beautiful and charming woman. Before his Marseilles visit she had found it an easy task to appeal to the fool that grins in every man. A trick of eyes and voice was enough to set him love-making in what she had termed the Quixtine manner. Now the task was more difficult. She found herself confronted by a greater sensitiveness that did not respond to the obvious invitation. He was up in the clouds, more chivalrous, more idealistic. With a sigh, she gathered her skirts together and climbed to the higher plane. And all this on Quixtus’s part was sheer remorse—atonement for the unspeakable insult. The thought of having dared to make coarse love to this exquisite creature filled him with horrified dismay. That the lady had appeared rather to like the coarse love-making he did not stop to consider. Certainly, in his crazy exultation, he had proclaimed her a fruit ripe to his hand, but that was only an additional vulgarity which had stained that peculiar phase of his being. The result of the reaction was to accentuate the reverential conception of woman, which, by reason of a temperament dreamy and poetic and of a scholarly life remote from the disillusionising conflicts of sex, he had always entertained. He comported himself therefore towards her with scrupulous delicacy, resolved that not a word or intonation that could be construed into an affront should ever pass his lips. The fine weather broke. Torrential rains swept Paris. The meteorologists talked learnedly about cyclonic disturbances in the Atlantic which would affect the weather adversely for some time to come. Lena Fontaine began to reflect. Summer Paris in rain is no place for junketing, even on the high planes. It offers to the visitor nothing but the boredom of hotel and restaurant. She knew the elementary axiom of sex relations, that the woman who bores a man is lost. The high planes were all right when you looked down from them on charming objective things; but, after all, a man has to be amused, and fun on the high planes is a humour dangerously attenuated. She announced an immediate departure from Paris. “If you would accept the escort of Huckaby and myself, we should be honoured,” said Quixtus. “Unless of course we should be in the way.” She laughed. “My dear friend, did you ever hear of men being in the way when women were travelling? A lone woman is never more conspicuously lonesome than _en voyage_. All the other women around who have men to look after them look at one with a kind of patronising pity, as though they said; ‘Poor thing that can’t rake up a man from anywhere.’ And it makes one want to scratch.” “Does it really?” smiled Quixtus. “It does.” She laughed again and sighed. “A lone woman has much to put up with. Malicious tongues not the least.”