have dulled your sensitiveness. You must have had some bad times."
He was touched. "It's good to hear you say that."
"For mercy's sake, why?"
He came back to a flippant tone to conceal his concession to sentimentality. "Because," he laughed, "it's another neat sign of your comprehension of small boys—or rather a small boy. It proves you, according to your own rating, approximately a genius. Besides, now that you've said it, I'm sure the verdict is only 'distrust.' It was not the sort of remark one makes of a person one dislikes."
"Aren't you conceited!" she commented.
"Ah, now I understand the grounds for distrust."
"I dare say you understand heaps of things. Here's the gate. Will you come in?"
He declined the formal invitation, and stood, throwing the lantern's rays along the pathway. Within the last half hour Phœbe had revived his romantic hopes for her. She seemed to have it in her to rise to occasions.
He splashed his way homeward with a refreshed courage. It was as though his inner egos were happily smiling, after long days and nights of unacknowledged chagrin.
As he entered his house he hummed a snatch from an opera he had heard in some far corner of the globe: "Io son barbiere, di qualita—di qualita."
Why, he asked himself, should that particular ditty come to his lips? What on earth was the association between The Barber of Seville and the mood of the evening? For a few moments he indulged in the fascinating exercise of thinking backward, in search of a clue to the mysterious workings of sub-consciousness. At last he had it: qualita, quality. "Quality" was the word for which his mind had groped at the dinner table, when trying to define the flavour of the Ashmill ladies.
