Then they considered Latimer of importance only because Helen liked him.

Now they discussed him impersonally and over her head, as though she were not present, as a power, an influence, as the leader and exponent of a new idea.

They seemed to think she no longer could pretend to any peculiar claim upon him, that now he belonged to all of them.
Older men would say to her: "I hear you know Latimer?
What sort of a man is he ?" Helen would not know what to tell them.

She could not say he was a man who sat with his back to a pine-tree, reading from a book of verse, or halting to devour her with humble, entreating eyes.
She went South for the winter, the doctors deciding she was run down and needed the change.

And with an unhappy laugh at her own expense she agreed in their diagnosis.