who released herself calmly from the appalling clasp of the casual and business-like old man.  To the Gabriella who had loved George such an episode would have appeared as an inconceivable horror.  Now, with her worldly wisdom and her bitter knowledge of love, she found herself regarding the situation with sardonic humour.  The stupendous, the incredible vanity of man!—­she reflected disdainfully.  Was there ever a man too ugly, too repulsive, or too old to delude himself with the belief that he might still become the object of passion?

“Now you’ve spoiled it,” she said shortly, but without embarrassment.  “Now you’ve spoiled it.”  She put the case to him plainly, the Gabriella who would have blushed and trembled and wept seventeen years ago.

“But I meant nothing,” he said, genuinely disturbed.  “I assure you I am truly sorry if I have offended you.  It was nothing—­a mere matter of—­” the word “habit,” she knew, hovered on his lips, though he did not utter it, and broke off inconclusively.

So there had not been even the excuse of emotion about it.  He had embraced her as instinctively, as methodically, as he might have switched on the electric light over his desk.  Here again she was brought to a stop before an overwhelming realization of the fundamental differences between man and woman.  To think of woman behaving like that merely because it had become a matter of habit!

“I always liked you, you know,” he said abruptly, with a sincere emphasis.

“Well, there are different ways of liking,” she rejoined coldly, “and I happen not to care for this way.”

“If you don’t like it, I’ll never do it again,” he promised, almost humbly.  “I’ll be a good friend to you, honestly I will.  I’ll treat you as if you were—­you were—­”

“A gentleman,” finished Gabriella, and smiled in spite of herself.  After all, what was the use of resenting the facts of life?  What was the use of reproaching the mud that spattered over one’s clothes?

“Well, that’s a bargain.  I’ll treat you as a gentleman.”  There was a fine quality about the man; she could not deny it.

“I’ll forgive you then and forget it.”  It was the tolerant Gabriella who spoke—­the Gabriella of disillusioning experience and a clear vision of life—­not the impassioned idealist of the ’nineties.  When all was said, you had to take men and things as you found them.  That was philosophy, and that was also “good business.”  It was foolish to apply romantic theories to the positive actuality.

“Well, you are a gentleman,” exclaimed the judge, with facetiousness.  “That’s why I always liked you, I suppose.  You’re straight and you’re honest and there’s no nonsense about you.”

If he had only known!  She thought of the romantic girl of the ’nineties, of her buoyant optimism, her childlike ignorance, her violent certainties, and of her triumphant, “I can manage my life!” If he had only known how she had “muddled things” at the beginning, would he have said that she had “no nonsense about her?”