"At the present moment," confessed Miss Jennings frankly, "I don't like it at all. It's a way things have when you get right up against them. They don't look so nice as they did at a distance."
"You are not in your usual spirits to-night."
"No," said the girl, "and that's a fact. I'm not. Worst of being a woman is that you can't trust yourself to be sensible all the time. You do a thing, and you know you're doing right, and you go on knowing it was right for weeks on end; and then, just when you want to feel that you were right most especially, you go and feel that you've been wrong all the time. Silly, I call it! Sometimes I want to shake myself."
"You feel you wish you had not left London? Is that the trouble?"
"Ye—es," said Miss Jennings reluctantly.
"I'm surprised," said Philip, cautiously opening fire, "that you were ever allowed to forsake your native land."
"Who by?" enquired Miss Jennings swiftly.
"Well, there are a good many thousand young men there, you know. It doesn't show much enterprise on their part—"
"Mr. Meldrum," remarked Miss Jennings frankly, "if you start making pretty speeches, the end of the world must be coming. A good many thousand young men, indeed!"
"Well," persisted the abashed but pertinacious Philip, "let us say one young man. Surely there was just one?"