"He was, and he wasn't. He would do anything I asked him; but if it went against the grain with him to do it he would say so before he did it--sometimes all the time he was doing it; and that rather spoils your pleasure, doesn't it?"
"I should have thought it would increase it," said Philip. "It would show your great power over him, that you should be able to compel him to do things against his will."
"Perhaps you are right," she said at last. "I hadn't thought of it that way. Still, his back-chat used to worry me to death. And his temper! It was so fierce, I was frightened of him. He was fierce, too, in the way he loved me. He would carry on something dreadful at times."
"Well, supposing I made an appointment with him, and changed my mind and didn't go--"
"Oh, yes, sometimes. It's a good thing to do," explained the experienced Miss Jennings. "If you don't act like that sometimes--promise to meet him somewhere and then forget--a man begins to think he's engaged to you. If a girl doesn't respect herself, who else will? That's what I say. Then his jealousy--my word!"
For a moment Miss Jennings's cheerful little Cockney voice grew quite shrill. Then came an expressive silence, which Philip construed as an aposiopetic allusion to this young gentleman whose face had been pushed in.
"Still," he persisted gently, "you were fond of him?"
Miss Jennings did not answer immediately.
"I suppose I was," she admitted at last. "But I think I was more sorry for him, if you know what I mean. He didn't know how to look after himself: he was like a child: he wanted a nurse. But if ever I did try to do anything for him, he took it up wrong. He thought I was getting soft on him, and before you could turn round he was trying to lord it over me. No, this affair never came to anything. It never could: we were made too different, both of us. Forget it!"
Miss Jennings ceased, and surveyed the long moonlit streak of foam astern rather wistfully. To-night the land she knew and the man she had been sorry for seemed to have receded to infinity: over the bow of the ship the unknown was creeping, hand over hand, inexorably. She sighed, and then shivered. She was realising the truth of her own dictum on the subject of a woman's inability to be sensible all the time.