Helena looked puzzled. "Then why do people write or read them?" she asked.
"My dear girl," he answered in the heavy-father manner that gave him such pleasure, "if you could answer that, you would have solved one of the most interesting problems about human nature!"
So then she was puzzled again and laid aside the book half read, before she got even to the chapter that was really censured and commonly read first.
Not that way, she saw, lay illumination.
At last she tried another road. "You know," she said reflectively one night, during those long hearthside chats that neither really would have changed for any other social form, "I like all the people here and so on, but they're terribly busy, aren't they, and I always feel I've sort of come too late."
"How sort of?" he replied indulgently.
"Well, I've got no real friends and you're busy so much with your dull old work. Don't you know anybody?—really know, I mean—old friends, who aren't too far away?"
Hubert thought for a few moments. "It sounds absurd," he said at last, "but I was such a hermit till I met you that I don't believe I've got a single woman friend."
Helena, he noticed, was not flattered in the least degree. That sort of thing was what made her so splendid. He told himself that a woman who was womanly would be a bore about the house, and smiled adoringly on his own child-like specimen, who waited silently, as though quite sure that he would find a friend in the same way that after some time he had found her brooch. But there was a long pause and he made no suggestions.
"Well, what about men then?" she added simply. "I don't mind."