"Well, supposing I made an appointment with him, and changed my mind and didn't go—"
"Oh, yes, sometimes. It's a good thing to do," explained the experienced Miss Jennings. "If you don't act like that sometimes—promise to meet him somewhere and then forget—a man begins to think he's engaged to you. If a girl doesn't respect herself, who else will? That's what I say. Then his jealousy—my word!"
For a moment Miss Jennings's cheerful little Cockney voice grew quite shrill. Then came an expressive silence, which Philip construed as an aposiopetic allusion to this young gentleman whose face had been pushed in.
"Still," he persisted gently, "you were fond of him?"
Miss Jennings did not answer immediately.
"I suppose I was," she admitted at last. "But I think I was more sorry for him, if you know what I mean. He didn't know how to look after himself: he was like a child: he wanted a nurse. But if ever I did try to do anything for him, he took it up wrong. He thought I was getting soft on him, and before you could turn round he was trying to lord it over me. No, this affair never came to anything. It never could: we were made too different, both of us. Forget it!"
Miss Jennings ceased, and surveyed the long moonlit streak of foam astern rather wistfully. To-night the land she knew and the man she had been sorry for seemed to have receded to infinity: over the bow of the ship the unknown was creeping, hand over hand, inexorably. She sighed, and then shivered. She was realising the truth of her own dictum on the subject of a woman's inability to be sensible all the time.
Then the voice of Philip broke the silence, expounding the simple philosophy of his simple life.
"Do you know," he said, "I think that all things are possible to two people who are prepared to make allowances for one another? You and the man you speak of both possess strong natures. You both wanted to be master. You both hated conceding anything. He regarded the acts of worship that a woman expects of the man who loves her as a form of humiliation; he was content to make good by material homage—presents, theatres, and so on. You on your part felt that in accepting these things from him you were weakening your own independence and laying yourself under an obligation to him. So he, when he made actual love to you, did so reluctantly and half-heartedly—didn't he?"