"Then let me tell you. I didn't sit in Daphne Bassett's pocket. I sat in Daphne Wade's."
I stared at her. Was she suggesting that while she herself had loved him since childhood, he for his part had loved Daphne Wade?
"Surely you're wrong there. If there was ever anything between her and him I'm no judge of men."
"There may not have 'been anything.' But there was everything for all that," she replied.
"That's merely enigmatic. Never mind 'everything.' Tell me what thing."
"All his dreams and ideals when he was a boy," she answered promptly. "Isn't that everything in a man like him—the everything he's on his way back to?"
"But he never loved her in the least, nor she him, as far as I'm aware."
"That I shall never forgive her.... Don't you know yet why he never knew anything about real women? It was simply because he was too wrapped up in his dreams. He was so full of them that he couldn't see anything truly for them. And now I'm afraid I'm going to dispel one of your most cherished illusions, George. Do you know why his dreams all settled on Daphne Wade? Oh, it had nothing to do with loving her!... It was simply because she had that coloured hair. It was rather like an aureole when she was a child. And her eyes were blue. In fact she'd all the conventional angelic appliances except the wings, and he supplied those. She'd nothing whatever else—little fool."
I frowned. Certainly she was entitled to speak of those early days towards which his face was once more set, since she had known him then, and I had not.
"Have some more coffee," I said. "I want to think this over."