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and music and books do you like?”
    “I like to waltz, to go to parties and be gay. I like amusing, lively people and music and books. Who does not?”
    “I see.” His answer was light, like her own, almost offhand, but she sensed she had wasted an opportunity to know him better. It was not often she was invited to partake of rational conversation. She was angry with herself suddenly, to have been so flippant. She didn’t like those things she mentioned, not to any great extent. She liked the country better than the city, liked riding better than dancing, she preferred good conversation to gossip, too. Most of all, she would like to feel she belonged somewhere, that there was a spot in the world where she was more than a bothersome guest. She wanted someone to love, and to love her, but she could hardly say so to a near-stranger, and a hateful, heartless stranger at that.
    “You enjoy travel, I think,” he mentioned, but in a half-hearted, make-talk sort of way.
    “I do not much like it,” some perversity caused her to say.
    “You do a fair bit of it.”
    “When the people you are staying with travel, you have to either go with them or cause a great bother, trying to find someone else to billet yourself on. There is no saying either that you won’t end up at Mecklenberg Square,” she added tartly.
    “Where would you prefer to end up?”
    “At home. At Drumbeig. But it is too far away, and there is no one to take me.”
    “Did Fannie never take you home?”
    “No, not once,” she answered, feeling very sorry for herself, and letting some trace of it creep into her voice.
    “What is it like, Drumbeig?” he asked, with enough interest that she answered in considerable detail.
    “It’s beautiful – away north in the Cotswold Hills, in Oxfordshire. Excellent riding of course, rough and rugged terrain.” She spoke on at length, mentioning her friends there, and as he posed a few thoughtful questions, she was soon relating to him episodes from her very childhood.
    “I have a hunting box not too far away from your place,” he mentioned. “It is beautiful countryside. Was there no one you might have stayed at home with after your father’s death?”
    “It was nearly time for me to be presented – everyone said I should be, and as father was – was seeing rather a lot of Fannie at the time, he left me in her charge.”
    “How old were you when you went to Fannie?”
    “Seventeen. I was presented at seventeen. Fannie thought it old enough. I was at Devonshire House a year before that, when my father was still alive, but ill. He had to be near the best physicians. Dr. Ward had him in his private sanatorium, and he wanted me to be close enough to visit him often. I stayed half a year there after his death, and half a year with Fannie before I made my come-out. She said it would help me forget him, going to parties and balls.”
    “Did it?”
    “I didn’t try to forget him. My happiest memories are of my father. I was very young when my mother died. I have nearly forgotten her, though Papa used to say I was very like her. No, I do not want to forget the best friend I ever had. I am sorry his memory is growing dim in my mind. I have no picture of him in London. Sometimes I can hardly remember how he looked.”
    “I must apologize for leading you into this conversation. It can hardly he amusing for you, and you have told me that is what you like, amusing talk and people.”
    “If you feel a fit of apology descending on your shoulders, apologize for where you have sent me to live. I didn’t mean to bore you with my autobiography.”
    “It was not at all boring.”
    There was less talk on the return trip. Each was sunk in his own ruminations, Barbara of her past, Clivedon trying to remember her then. Seventeen was a young age for a country girl to have been thrown to the London wolves. An impressionable age too, just at the edge of womanhood. He had only the haziest memory of her at that time. Young