She shook her head.  “I only remember that I meant to have helped you.  And I was very sorry because I couldn’t.  But I see now how absurd it was of me; and how unnecessary.”

He knew that she was thinking now of her private secretary.

“It was beautiful of you.  But, you know, it couldn’t have happened.  It was one of those beautiful things that never can happen.”

“That’s why I was so sorry.  I thought it must look as if I hadn’t meant it.”

“But you did mean it.  Nothing can alter that, can it?”

“No.  You must take the will for the deed.”

“I do.  The will is the only thing that matters.”

“Yes.  But—­it was absurd of me—­but I thought you might have been counting on it?”

“Did I count on it?  I suppose I did; though I knew it was impossible.  You forget that I knew all the time it was impossible.  It was only a beautiful idea.”

“I’m sorry, then, that it had to remain an idea.”

“Don’t be sorry.  Perhaps that’s the only way it could remain beautiful.  It wouldn’t have done, you know.  You only thought it could because you were so kind.  It was all very well for me to work for you for three weeks or so.  It would have been very different when you had me on your hands for a whole year at a stretch.  And it’s much better for me that it never came off than if I’d had to see you sorry for it afterwards.”

“If I had been sorry, I should not have let you see it.”

“I should have seen it, though, whether you let me or not.  I always see these things.”

“But I think, you know, that I wouldn’t have been sorry.”

“You would!  You would!  You couldn’t have stood me.”

“I think I could.”

“What, a person with a villainous cockney accent?  Who was capable of murdering the Queen’s English any day in your drawing-room?”

“Oh, no; whatever you do you’ll never do that.”

“Well, I don’t know.  I’m not really to be trusted unless I’ve got a pen in my hand.  I’m better than I used to be.  I’ve struggled against it.  Still, a man who has once murdered the Queen’s English always feels, you know, as if he’d got the body under the sofa.  It’s like homicidal mania; the poor wretch may be cured, but he lives in terror of an attack returning.  He knows it doesn’t matter what he is or what he does; he may live like a saint or write like an archangel; but one aitch omitted from his conversation will wreck him at the last.”

“You needn’t be afraid; you never omit them.”

“You mean I never omit them now.  But I did five years ago.  I couldn’t help it.  Everybody about me did it.  The only difference between them and me was that I knew it, and they didn’t.”

“You were conscious of it, then?”

“Conscious?  Do you know, that for every lapse of the sort in your presence I suffered the torments of the damned?  Do you suppose I didn’t know how terrible I was?”