Helen demanded personality even of things. She inveterately accused persons of being persons, and brought them to her judgment bar to account for themselves. Thaddeus thought Mrs. Mavering should be looked at for art's sake, for the improvement of the tone of society; that an official sign, so to speak, was somewhere at hand, warning that no one was permitted to touch her humanly.
Helen had not seen the sign. They had met first in the dark and had been introduced by a sigh, and she had never been aware of the barrier with which Mrs. Mavering was observed to be surrounded. Only Mrs. Mavering was given to riddling. She acknowledged herself a person to Helen, stormed by her headlong admiration, but she never accounted for herself at the bar, or, as Helen stated it. "Whenever you say something, and I ask what you mean, you always act as if you didn't like what you meant, but you never say what it was." So far as our sayings come out of ourselves and ourselves out of our experience, if part of the experience were such that we wished to fly from that part of ourselves and could only flutter the more about it, supposing this to be Mrs. Mavering's case, her impulse to dodge Helen's bar of equity might be understood—and the fact, too, that she found herself ever provoking an arraignment. Helen had to dismiss case after case for lack of evidence, and because the defendant wanted to play something else. So that she only wondered now what Mrs. Mavering meant by "Men would rather have the sacrifice appreciated than the service," and whether one would naturally become difficult by being ten years older.
"I shall call you Lady Rachel, because you're beautiful," she said, and the organist of Saint Mary's stood outside the while and thought he would rather talk to Mrs. Mavering than call spectres from the peaks of his gilded organ-pipes that blown, desolate night.
Of course, one could not become beautiful like Mrs. Mavering—not in a hundred years. One's nose would not become straight, one's hair black and heapy, nor eyes change from gray to amber and brown; and in order to become as difficult it would be necessary to be married and have one's husband become unapparent without becoming dead. Mrs. Mavering was an arduous ideal. Helen doubted that she would ever achieve it.
"Then I must call you Sir Helen, because you're such a valiant knight, and always charging something, and driving a spear into the middle of an idea, as if it were a dragon. But my ideas are not honest, so they have no middles, and it only makes them look mussy."
"Then," said Helen, quickly, "if I'm a knight I choose to be in love with you. You're locked in a tower and I'm after an ogre, only I don't make out very well what he's doing. Of course, he growls and rages."
"I dare say he does."
"Well, then, Saint Denis Montjoie! It is a beautiful fight."
Gard was announced and presently came in. Mrs. Mavering said:
"Can you play a game? You haven't met Miss Bourn? She is pursuing an ogre around a tower. I am locked in the tower. She doesn't care whether I like being rescued or not. She isn't sure yet about the ogre, but thinks she needs one."