I wanted to make a long speech--about duty to the name of Granger.

But the next word hung, and, before it came, she had answered: "He ?--Oh, I'm making use of him." "To inherit the earth ?" I asked ironically, and she answered gravely: "To inherit the earth." She was leaning against the window, playing with the strings of the blinds, and silhouetted against the leaden light.

She seemed to be, physically, a little tired; and the lines of her figure to interlace almost tenderly--to "compose" well, after the ideas of a certain school.
I knew so little of her--only just enough to be in love with her--that this struck me as the herald of a new phase, not so much in her attitude to me as in mine to her; she had even then a sort of gravity, the gravity of a person on whom things were beginning to weigh.
"But," I said, irresolutely.

I could not speak to her; to this new conception of her, in the way I had planned; in the way one would talk to a brilliant, limpid--oh, to a woman of sorts.

But I had to take something of my old line.