"Well, New York ought to do that for you."
"I think it is doing it."
"But it's like your accent; it goes slowly." Mrs. Spaulding had seated herself, and was looking at him with her elbows on the table and a meditative chin buried in her thick boa.
"I think you ought to fall in love."
She repeated it, with conviction, and then suddenly, asked him: "Haven't you ever been that way?"
He looked at her with a face both serious and, she thought, unnecessarily chilling.
"There, I told you—the shell!" she cried warningly. "Tell me, now, weren't you ever in love?"
A barrier, impregnable as steel, a barrier beaten out by all the years of an existence uncomprehended and a secrecy unrespected, fell between them. A sense of his isolation, a touch of the sorrow of the alien, crept over him. And as he looked at the woman who thus questioned him it seemed very long ago, and very far away, that old life, and those old days amid the soft Oxfordshire hills.
Mrs. Spaulding put out her hand to him, unexpectedly.
"I'm afraid you're going to be very lonely here at first," she said.