"It is Finch. George Finch."
"Splendid!"
She seemed genuinely pleased. She beamed upon him as if he had brought her good news from a distant land.
"Your father," proceeded George, not having anything to add by way of development of the theme but unable to abandon it, "thought it was Pinch. Or Winch. But it is not. It is Finch."
His eye, roaming nervously about the room, caught hers for an instant: and he was amazed to perceive that there was in it nothing of that stunned abhorrence which he felt his appearance and behaviour should rightly have aroused in any nice-minded girl. Astounding though it seemed, she appeared to be looking at him in a sort of pleased, maternal way, as if he were a child she was rather fond of. For the first time a faint far-off glimmer of light shone upon George's darkness. It would be too much to say that he was encouraged, but out of the night that covered him, black as the pit from pole to pole, there did seem to sparkle for an instant a solitary star.
"How did you come to know father?"
George could answer that. He was all right if you asked him questions. It was the having to invent topics of conversation that baffled him.
"I met him outside the house: and when he found that I came from the West he asked me in to dinner."
"Do you mean he rushed at you and grabbed you as you were walking by?"
"Oh, no. I wasn't walking by. I was—er—sort of standing on the door-step. At least...."