'
"He got quite ill over it. The girl's mother asked him to the house, the
girl herself, though she saw him less and less alone, smiled at him as
tenderly as ever. And then there came a day when he left me full of
courage, and going to her house he asked her to marry him. He met her
alone by chance, and before asking her mother he spoke to the girl
herself. She said no, point-blank. She said 'Nothing would induce her
to.' He was so astonished that he didn't stay a second longer in the
house. He didn't even come to me, but went back into the country, and
then to England."
"But why did the girl--?"
"There is nothing to ask. Or, at any rate, there is no answer to
anything. I suppose he asked himself every question about her conduct,
but it was inexplicable."
"He should have asked her twice."
"It never occurred to him. And he has told me lately that she refused
him with such considered firmness that it seemed unlikely that it was
a whim."
"Well--poor Alfred! And yet it was only the merest chance, the merest
run of bad luck--but it leaves him, you say, with the impression that we
are flawed?"
"A terrible flaw. His opinion is that there is a deep coldness in
women. In the brain, too, he feels them mortally unsound. Mad and cold
he says now of all women, and therefore as unlike a normal man as a
creature half-lunatic, half-snake.
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