And there came a change in Isabel. It was like some change in the cycle of nature, like the onset of spring--a sharp brightness, an uneasiness. She became restless with her work; little encounters with men began to happen, encounters not quite in the quality of the earlier proposals; and then came an odd incident of which she told me, but somehow, I felt, didn't tell me completely. She told me all she was able to tell me. She had been at a dance at the Ropers', and a man, rather well known in London, had kissed her. The thing amazed her beyond measure. It was the sort of thing immediately possible between any man and any woman, that one never expects to happen until it happens. It had the surprising effect of a judge generally known to be bald suddenly whipping off his wig in court. No absolutely unexpected revelation could have quite the same quality of shock. She went through the whole thing to me with a remarkable detachment, told me how she had felt--and the odd things it seemed to open to her. “I WANT to be kissed, and all that sort of thing,” she avowed. “I suppose every woman does.” She added after a pause: “And I don't want any one to do it.” This struck me as queerly expressive of the woman's attitude to these things. “Some one presently will--solve that,” I said. “Some one will perhaps.” I was silent. “Some one will,” she said, almost viciously. “And then we'll have to stop these walks and talks of ours, dear Master.... I'll be sorry to give them up.” “It's part of the requirements of the situation,” I said, “that he should be--oh, very interesting! He'll start, no doubt, all sorts of new topics, and open no end of attractive vistas.... You can't, you know, always go about in a state of pupillage.” “I don't think I can,” said Isabel. “But it's only just recently I've begun to doubt about it.” I remember these things being said, but just how much we saw and understood, and just how far we were really keeping opaque to each other then, I cannot remember. But it must have been quite soon after this that we spent nearly a whole day together at Kew Gardens, with the curtains up and the barriers down, and the thing that had happened plain before our eyes. I don't remember we ever made any declaration. We just assumed the new footing....