"It seems to me," he said, "that only a very short time ago, Duchess, out of solicitude for my extreme ignorance, you warned me against setting my affections too high."
"I was speaking then of marriage," she replied coolly.
"I see! And yet," he went on, "I am not quite sure that I do see. Is there any radical difference between marriage and a really intimate friendship between a man and a woman?"
She smiled. Her slight movement towards him was almost a caress.
"My dear, unsophisticated cave-dweller!" she murmured. "Marriage is an alliance which lasts for all time. It is apt, is it not, to leave its stamp upon future generations. Great friendships have existed amongst people curiously diverse in tastes and temperament and position. A certain disparity, in fact, is rather the vogue."
"I begin to understand," he admitted. "That accounts for the curious club stories which one is always having dinned into one's ears, hatefully uninteresting though they are, of Lady So-and-So entertaining a great fiddler at her country house, or some other Society lady dancing in a singular lack of costume for the pleasure of artists in a borrowed studio."
"You are not nearly so nice-minded as I thought you were," the Duchess snapped.
"It is just my painful efforts to understand," he protested.
"Any one but an idiot would have understood long ago," she retorted.
David turned to his left-hand neighbour.