It was outdoor weather; but the party had been arranged for pairing, and he saw little but his hostess.
They spent the days upon the dozing river, and sat together late into the warm nights upon the lawn.
He knew nothing about women, and did not understand their ways. Therefore he was gravely interested in the account she set before him of her groping soul.
He had never imagined any conception of existence so out of touch with reality as were her beliefs. Her idealism would have discredited a schoolgirl's fiction, and she clung to it as though there were some merit in being deceived.
Such determination to remain in the dark almost angered him.
"But men and women aren't like that," he expostulated more than once.
"That's what people are always telling me," she replied pathetically: "but why aren't they?"
He hadn't, as he assured her, the remotest notion; his interest lying, not in what men weren't, but in what they were.
He tried to impart that interest in her, but without success.
If men were the brutes they seemed proud to be, she asserted vigorously, she didn't care how ill she knew them.