I wondered dimly if she meant that as a challenge. I helped myself to a biscuit thing that looked neither poisonous nor sandy. “You are one of the most puzzling human 

 

beings I ever met,” I said,—a perfectly¹ safe remark to any woman under any circumstances.

“Do you find me so hard to understand?” she said.

“You are dreadfully complex.” I bit at the biscuit thing, and found it full of a kind of creamy bird-lime. (I wonder why women will arrange these unpleasant 

 

surprises for me—I sickened of sweets twenty years ago.)

“How so?” she was saying, and smiling her most brilliant smile.

I have no doubt she thought we were talking rather nicely. “Oh!” said I, and waved the cream biscuit thing. “You challenge me to dissect² you.”

“Well?”

“And that is precisely³ what I cannot do.”

360“I’m afraid you are very satirical,” she said, with a touch of disappointment. She is always saying that when our conversation has become absolutely idiotic—as 

 

it invariably does. I felt an inevitable⁴ desire to quote bogus Latin to her. It seemed the very language for her.

“Malorum fiducia pars⁵ quosque libet,” I said, in a low voice, looking meaningly into her eyes.

“Ah!” she said, colouring a little, and turned to pour hot water into the teapot, looking very prettily⁶ at me over her arm as she did so.

“That is one of the truest things that has ever been said of sympathy,” I remarked. “Don’t you think so?”

“Sympathy,” she said, “is a very wonderful thing, and a very precious thing.”

“You speak,” said I (with a cough behind my hand), “as though you knew what it was to be lonely.”

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