listened to them without in the least pricking up his ears; on the other hand the real truth was equally liable at any moment to rise to the surface, and the auditor would then have wondered indeed what they were talking about.  They had from an early hour made up their mind that society was, luckily, unintelligent, and the margin allowed them by this had fairly become one of their commonplaces.  Yet there were still moments when the situation turned almost fresh—­usually under the effect of some expression drawn from herself.  Her expressions doubtless repeated themselves, but her intervals were generous.  “What saves us, you know, is that we answer so completely to so usual an appearance:  that of the man and woman whose friendship has become such a daily habit—­or almost—­as to be at last indispensable.”  That for instance was a remark she had frequently enough had occasion to make, though she had given it at different times different developments.  What we are especially concerned with is the turn it happened to take from her one afternoon when he had come to see her in honour of her birthday.  This anniversary had fallen on a Sunday, at a season of thick fog and general outward gloom; but he had brought her his customary offering, having known her now long enough to have established a hundred small traditions.  It was one of his proofs to himself, the present he made her on her birthday, that he hadn’t sunk into real selfishness.  It was mostly nothing more than a small trinket, but it was always fine of its kind, and he was regularly careful to pay for it more than he thought he could afford.  “Our habit saves you, at least, don’t you see? because it makes you, after all, for the vulgar, indistinguishable from other men.  What’s the most inveterate mark of men in general?  Why the capacity to spend endless time with dull women—­to spend it I won’t say without being bored, but without minding that they are, without being driven off at a tangent by it; which comes to the same thing.  I’m your dull woman, a part of the daily bread for which you pray at church.  That covers your tracks more than anything.”

“And what covers yours?” asked Marcher, whom his dull woman could mostly to this extent amuse.  “I see of course what you mean by your saving me, in this way and that, so far as other people are concerned—­I’ve seen it all along.  Only what is it that saves you?  I often think, you know, of that.”

She looked as if she sometimes thought of that too, but rather in a different way.  “Where other people, you mean, are concerned?”

“Well, you’re really so in with me, you know—­as a sort of result of my being so in with yourself.  I mean of my having such an immense regard for you, being so tremendously mindful of all you’ve done for me.  I sometimes ask myself if it’s quite fair.  Fair I mean to have so involved and—­since one may say it—­interested you.  I almost feel as if you hadn’t really had time to do anything else.”