"I am not so sure about that," she answered.
"You have misunderstood me if you imagine for a moment that I came here to ask you to make up the amount of your husband's defalcations."
"What did you come for, then?"
"I came," Peter Phipps declared, "entirely out of consideration for you. I came to ask what you wished done, and to do it. I came to assure you of my sympathy; if you will accept it, my friendship; and if you will further honour me by accepting it, my help."
"Just how do you propose to help me?" Josephine enquired.
"Just in the way," he answered, "that a man to whom money is of no account may sometimes help a woman for whom he has a most profound, a most sincere, a most respectful admiration".
"You came, in fact," Josephine said, "to place your bank account at my disposal?"
"I would never have ventured," he protested, "to have put the matter so crudely. I came to express my admiration for you and my desire to help you."
"And in return?"
"I do not bargain. Lady Dredlinton," Phipps said slowly. "I must confess that if you could regard me with a little more toleration, if you would accept at any rate a measure of my friendship, would endeavour, may I say, to adopt a more sympathetic attitude with regard to me, it would give me the deepest pleasure."