Lettice, who could not bear to see a book mishandled, had picked up Dorothea's, and was smoothing its rumpled pages. She accommodated herself with patience to this violent change of subject. "Denis?" she said. "He is very nice." Convenient word! In Lettice's vocabulary it covered a multitude of meanings.
"I like his face. He looks as if he were in the army. Is he in the army? What does he do?"
"He—he's a sort of engineer."
"An engineer? A civil engineer? That's not bad; they do do things worth doing—they and an explorer here and there, and the flying men—I like them best. I like courage, physical courage, it's far more interesting than moral. I shouldn't think your cousin would ever know what it was to feel afraid. And wouldn't he never tell a lie?"
"Never," said Lettice, her eyes straying to her Latin grammar.
"Not even to save a friend? He'd do anything else, take any risk himself, but just not that? So that if he was pushed into a corner he'd have to tell the truth? That's just what I should have expected. Of course there are a few things I have against him," Dorothea ran on, seemingly at random, though her downcast eyes were glowing. "He shouldn't like cats, nasty treacherous things, they're not a man's animal. And he shouldn't sing the hymns on Sunday out of that big book with tunes. Going to church is all right, and suits him, but I can't bear that book. It's like the W.S.P.A." Presumably Miss O'Connor meant the Y.M.C.A. "Mr. Gardiner's his very greatest friend, isn't he? Would he tell lies, do you think?"
"I don't know," said Lettice, far down the passive voice of amo.
"What do you think of him?"
"I think he's very nice."