Mary was warmly touched by the thought of Wallace’s coming to see her in that special sort of way when he was certain of finding her at dinner an hour or two later.  Her feelings about him were rather mixed but he dated back to the very earliest of her memories, and his kindly affectionate attitude toward her had never failed, even during those periods when she had treated him most detestably.  Even as a little girl, she had been aware of his sentimental attachment to her mother and perhaps in an instinctive way had resented it, though her actual indictment against Wallace in those days had always been that he made her naughty; incited her by his perpetual assumption that she was the angelic little creature she looked, to one desperate misdemeanor after another, for which her father usually punished her.  Mary had, superficially anyhow, her mother’s looks along with her father’s temper.

But for two years after Mrs. Wollaston’s death, she and Wallace had been very good friends.  She was grateful to him for treating her like a grown-up, for talking to her, as he often did, about her mother and how much she had meant to him. (She owed it, indeed, largely to Wallace that her memories of this sentimental, romantic, passionless lady with whom in life she had never been completely in sympathy, were as sweet and satisfactory as they were.) He had taken infinite pains with her, guiding her reading and her enjoyment of pictures in the paths of good taste.  He took her to concerts sometimes, too, though at this point her docility ceased.  She wouldn’t be musical for anybody.  He gave her much-needed advice in dealing with social matters which her sudden prematurity forced her to cope with.  And with all this went a placidity which had no part at all in her relations with her father.

She got the idea, during this period, that he meant, when she was a little older, to ask her to marry him, and she sometimes speculated whether, if he did, she would.  There would be something beautifully appropriate about it;—­like the Professor’s Love Story.  Usually, though, she terminated the scene with a tender refusal.

She had long known, of course, how unreal all this was.  Wallace had faded into complete invisibility at the time when she fell in love with Captain Burch and quarreled with her father about him.  She couldn’t remember afterward whether he had even been on the scene or not.  But the savor of their friendship, though mild, was a pleasant one and there was none of her old acquaintances she’d rather have looked forward to to-day at tea-time in the drawing-room.  She knew exactly what he would be like; just what they would say to each other.  The only doubt in her mind was whether he’d bring her chocolates or daffodils.

She guessed wrong.  It was a box of candied strawberries that he gave her as soon as their double hand-shake set him free.  But nothing else came at once to the surface to falsify her prevision.  She remembered how he liked his tea and was able to get an affectionate warmth into her voice, that sounded real though strangely enough it wasn’t, in agreeing with him how like old times this was and how good it seemed to be home.  Then came the joy of having Rush back again, and the war, and the Peace Conference,—­only we weren’t going to talk about things like that.  And then Alan Seeger, Rupert Brooke, Conningsby Dawson.