Now at last his eyes were opened--he had achieved a standard of comparison and he felt her commonness with an awakening of his literary instinct, quite as acutely, he told himself, as he should have felt it had she been presented to him in the form of a printed page.

The sense of remoteness, of strangeness, grew upon him at each instant; he realised the uselessness of his good intentions toward her--the utter impossibility of snatching her or any human creature from the clutch of temperament.
Her day was filled with engagements, she told him at the end of luncheon when she rose to hurry off while he still lingered over his coffee; "and I shan't be here to dine, either," she added, as an after thought.

"Gus Brady will come for me--there's the opera and a supper afterwards, so you needn't trouble to sit up." "But whom are you going with ?" he enquired, filled for the first time with a painful curiosity concerning the social body in which Connie moved.
She shook her head with a gesture of irritation, while the aigrette in her hat sent out little iridescent flashes of blue and green.

"Oh, you wouldn't know if I told you," she answered impatiently, and left the room so hastily that he felt she had meant to wriggle away from the repeated question.

What did it mean?
he wondered for a minute as he slowly sipped his coffee.