Prudence's world had not brought any of these experiences into her life. She never met any men, save her father's friends and William's, none of whom were calculated to awaken sentiment in the breast of a girl of eighteen. The youngest of these was a man of forty, a nice kind old thing, who brought her chocolates, and pulled her curls before she put her hair up. Since the hair had gone up he had ceased to pull it, and he did not bring her chocolates so often; his kindliness had become more formal; but she liked him rather better on that account; the teasing had sometimes annoyed her. Like most girls, Prudence allowed her mind at times to dwell on the subject of love and marriage. The older girls at school had discussed these subjects freely: one of them had professed an undying passion for the drawing-master, who was married, and had asseverated before an admiring audience in the playing-field that she would cheerfully ignore the wife and run away with him if he asked her. He had not asked her. He had indeed been entirely unaware of her devotion, and had regarded her as a rather dull pupil. Prudence had considered her silly. Also she held a belief that emotional excitement was not love. She was not very clear in her thoughts what the term love expressed exactly; but she believed that when it did come love would be a big thing. She did not consider it in relation with marriage: marriage was a contract, often a convenience. She would have been glad herself to marry, merely to escape from Agatha and Wortheton. When a girl was married she could at least fashion her own life. And Prudence loved children. She envied Bessie Clapp her coming motherhood more than she pitied her on account of the social ostracism entailed thereby. Prudence's ideas on morality, never having been wisely directed, inclined to exalt the beauty of motherhood and to ignore the baser aspect of crude and illicit passions selfishly indulged. It is not the maternal woman who brings children into the world with a selfish disregard for the shame of their nameless birth. While Prudence leaned from her window and thought of love and motherhood, she became abruptly and amazedly aware of a figure in the road beyond the high wall--a man's figure, tall and straight in the moonlight--walking with a purposeful air down the hill towards the town. The man glanced up at the lighted window in which the girlish form was brightly framed, and broke off abruptly in the middle of a bar he was whistling softly, paused for the fraction of a second, and then went swinging on down the hill. He was a stranger; Prudence recognised that; there were no young men, except the factory employees and the tradesmen, in Wortheton. "I wonder," she murmured to herself, and leaned further out to look after the vanishing figure, "what it feels like to be in love..."