He proceeded in his easy and detached manner, that seemed to make every topic possible, to tell her his first impressions of her, and show how very distinctly indeed he remembered her.
"You set me philosophizing. I'd never examined a girls' school before, and I was suddenly struck by the spectacle of the fifty of you. What's going to become of them all?"
"I thought," he went on, "how bright you were, and how keen and eager you were—you, I mean, in particular—and just how certain it was your brightness and eagerness would be swallowed up by some silly ordinariness or other—stuffy marriage or stuffy domestic duties. The old, old story—done over again with a sort of threadbare badness. (Nothing to say against it if it's done well.) I got quite sentimental and pathetic about life's breach of faith with women. Odd, isn't it, how one's mind runs on. But that's what I thought. It's all come back to me."
Marjorie's bright, clear eye came round to him. "I don't see very much wrong with the lot of women," she reflected. "Things are different nowadays. Anyhow——"
She paused.
"You don't want to be a man?"
"No!"
She was emphatic.
"Some of us cut more sharply at life than you think," he said, plumbing her unspoken sense.
She had never met a man before who understood just how a girl can feel the slow obtuseness of his sex. It was almost as if he had found her out at something.