And all the time it grew, it grew on him, that sense of tenderness and absurdity. He found it—that ineffable and poignant quality—in everything about her and in everything she did—in the gravity of her deportment at the Poly.; in her shy essaying of the parallel bars; in the incredible swiftness with which she ran before him in the Maze; in the way her hair, tied up with an immense black bow in a door-knocker plat, rose and fell forever on her shoulders as she ran. He found it in the fact he had discovered that her companions called her by absurd and tender names; Winky, and even Winks, they called her.
That was in the autumn of nineteen-one; and he was finding it all over again now in the spring of nineteen-two.
At last, he didn't know how it happened, but one night, having caught up with her after a hot chase, close by the railings of the Parish Church in Wandsworth High Street, in the very moment of parting from her he turned round and said, "Look here, Miss Dymond, you think I don't like seeing you home, don't you?"
"To be sure I do. It must be a regular nuisance, night after night," she answered.
"Well, it isn't," he said. "I like it. But look here—if you hate it—"
"Me?"
She said it with a simple, naïve amazement.
"Yes, you."
He was almost brutal.
"But I don't. What an idea!"