I frowned. Certainly she was entitled to speak of those early days towards which his face was once more set, since she had known him then, and I had not.
"Have some more coffee," I said. "I want to think this over."
"Oh, you needn't. You'll save yourself a lot of trouble by simply taking my word for it. In any case it's getting on for thirty years ago. Oh, don't I just remember!... I was nine and he was fourteen; I was ten and he was fifteen; I was eleven and he was sixteen. She's just a year older than I am. Our pew was half-way down the church, but she sat up one of the aisles, right under a stained-glass window there was. It used to make that light on her hair. My hair was the wrong colour--I knew it then--just a dark mop--but anyway it was full of life. It would still have been dark, of course, even if I'd sat under the window instead of her, but I've sometimes thought it might have made a difference. Then there was all the rest; Dicksee's 'Harmony' sort of effect; all so cool and dim and saintly; and the organ and the Psalms. _That's_ what filled his head, and I honestly believe that unless women are just animals to him he sees them like that still--just about as much flesh and blood as that window was. All she had to do was to have that hair and those eyes and to sit in the vicarage pew. Things are made very simple for some women."
A long silence fell between us. Evidently she was back in that church, an adoring wrong-coloured-haired girl of eleven, shifting in her seat to see, past intervening bonnets and bald heads, Derry's browny-gold crown, while he watched Daffy Wade and the window.
"But," I said at last, "aren't you rather anticipating? I thought we'd settled he was thirty-five or thirty-three. That's making him sixteen already."
"George, do you realise that we're the last people here and that they've turned half the lights out?" Then, drawing forward her furs from the back of her chair, "It isn't making him anything of the sort. You're more than thirty-five; but you sometimes _remember_ what you were at sixteen, don't you?... Come and put me into my Tube and off you go to bed. Who knows?--he might 'blow in' to Cambridge Circus----"
"_You sometimes remember what you were at sixteen!_"