It even happened that, seeing her home at such times, he
occasionally went in with her to finish, as he called it, the
evening, and, the better to make his point, sat down to the frugal
but always careful little supper that awaited his pleasure. His
point was made, he thought, by his not eternally insisting with her
on himself; made for instance, at such hours, when it befell that,
her piano at hand and each of them familiar with it, they went over
passages of the opera together. It chanced to be on one of these
occasions, however, that he reminded her of her not having answered
a certain question he had put to her during the talk that had taken
place between them on her last birthday. "What is it that saves
YOU?"--saved her, he meant, from that appearance of variation from
the usual human type. If he had practically escaped remark, as she
pretended, by doing, in the most important particular, what most
men do--find the answer to life in patching up an alliance of a
sort with a woman no better than himself--how had she escaped it,
and how could the alliance, such as it was, since they must suppose
it had been more or less noticed, have failed to make her rather
positively talked about?
"I never said," May Bartram replied, "that it hadn't made me a good
deal talked about.
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