enthusiastic encouragement he was disinclined to be anything but discreet and cautions about Elfrida.  In one way and another she was, at all events, a young lady of potentialities, he reflected, and with a view to their effect among one’s friends it might be as well to understand them.  He went so far as to say to himself that Janet was such a thoroughly nice girl as she was; and then he smiled inwardly at the thought of how angry she would be at the idea of his putting any prudish considerations on her account into the balance against an interesting acquaintance.  He had, nevertheless, a distinct satisfaction in the fact that it was really circumstances, in the shape of the Decade article, that had brought them together, and that he could hardly charge himself with being more than an irresponsible agent in the matter.

Under the influence of such considerations Kendal did not write to Elfrida at the Age office asking her address, as he had immediately resolved to do when he discovered that she had gone away without telling him where he might find her.  It seemed to him that he could not very well see her at her lodgings.  And the pleasure of coming upon her suddenly as she closed the door of the Age behind her and stepped out into Fleet Street a fortnight later overcame him too quickly to permit him to reflect that he was yielding to an opposite impulse in asking her to dine with him at Baliero’s, as they might have done in Paris.  It was an unlooked-for opportunity, and it roused a desire which he had not lately been calculating upon—­a desire to talk with her about all sorts of things, to feel the exhilaration of her artistic single-mindedness, to find out more about her, to guess at the meanings behind her eyes.  If any privileged cynic had taken the chance to ask him whether he found her eyes expressive of purely abstract significance, Kendal would have answered affirmatively in all honesty.  And he would have added a confession of his curiosity to discover what she was capable of, if she was capable of anything—­which he considered legitimate enough.  At the moment, however, he had no time to think of anything but an inducement, and he dashed through whole pickets of scruples to find one.  “They give one such capital strawberry ices at Baliero’s,” he begged her to believe.  His resolutions did not even reassert themselves when she refused.  He was conscious only that it was a bore that she should refuse, and very inconsistent; hadn’t she often dined with him at the Cafe Florian?  His gratification was considerable when she added, “They smoke there, you know,” and, it became obvious, by whatever curious process of reasoning she arrived at it, that it was Baliero’s restaurant she objected to, and not his society.

“Well,” he urged, “there are plenty of places where they don’t smoke, though it didn’t occur to me that—­”

“Oh,” she laughed; “but you must allow it to occur to you,” and she put her finger on her lip.  Considering their solitariness in the crowd, he thought, there was no reason why he should not say that he was under the impression she liked the smell of tobacco.