They were now walking back towards the Park.
'Call me Dick Langley,' she said, 'and talk to me as if I were a boy, and then perhaps you can tell me all you mean and all you want to do. I am tired of this perpetual difficulty.'
'It wouldn't help in the least,' the Dictator said, 'if I were to call you Dick Langley. You would still be Helena Langley.'
The girl, usually so fearless and unconstrained—so unconventional, those said who liked her—so reckless, they said who did not like her—this girl felt for the first time in her life the meaning of the conventional—the all-pervading meaning of the difference of sex. For the mere sound of her own name, 'Helena,' pronounced by Ericson, sent such a thrill of delight through her that it made her cheek flush. It did a great deal more than that—it made her feel that she could not long conceal her emotion towards the Dictator, could not long pretend that it was nothing more than that which the most enthusiastic devotee feels for a political leader. A shock of fear came over her, something compounded of exquisite pleasure and bewildering pain. That one word 'Helena,' spoken perhaps carelessly by the man who walked beside her, broke in upon her soul and sense with the awakening touch of a revelation. She awoke, and she knew that she must soon betray herself. She knew that never again could she have the careless freedom of heart which she owned but yesterday. She was afraid. She felt tears coming into her eyes. She stopped suddenly, and put her hand to her side and gasped as if for breath.
'What is the matter?' Ericson asked. 'Are you unwell?'
'No, no!' she said hastily. 'I felt just a little faintish for a moment—but it's nothing. I am not a bit of a fainting girl, Mr. Ericson, I can assure you—never fainted in all my life. I have the nerves of a bull-dog and the digestion of an ostrich.'
'You don't quite look like that now,' he said, in an almost compassionate tone. He was puzzled. Something had undoubtedly happened to make her start and pause like that. But he could only think of something physical; it never occurred to him to suppose that anything he had said could have caused it.
'Shall we go back to what we were talking about?' he asked.
'What we were talking about?' Already her new discovery had taken away some of her sincerity, and inspired her with the sense of a necessity for self-defence. Already, and for the first time in her life, she was having recourse to one of the commonest, and, surely, one of the least culpable, of the crafts and tricks of womanhood, she was trying not to betray her love to the man who, so far as she knew, had not thought of love for her.
'Well, you were accusing me of a want of frankness with you, and were urging me to be more open?'