"Not exactly. But he really had a sort of convulsion when I told him that I intended to give up society. I was quite alarmed."
"You told him that?"
"Yes. I was carried away. You see, we had been speaking"—Mrs. Verulam lowered her voice—"of James Bush."
Chloe plunged on her pillows so as to get a clearer view of her friend's face, on which she fixed her sparkling, boyish eyes with a merciless scrutiny.
"Ah!" she said. "Now tell me all about him. Who is he? What is he? Where is he?"
Mrs. Verulam clasped Chloe's hand on the quilt softly.
"Chloe," she said, "he is a man!"
"I gathered that. Very few women are called James."
"That's not enough. It is not a christening that makes a man, it is life."
The faithful Marriner looked up from her pocket Schopenhauer with respectful appreciation of this reasoned truth.