That was how this girl's face, that was not beautiful, contrived to give an impression of strange beauty, fascinating and stupefying as her voice.
"Your hanging about like this. It won't help you. It won't, really. You don't know Winny."
"I say, did she ask you to tell me that?"
"Not she! 'Tisn't likely. And if she did, you don't suppose I'd let on. I'm giving you the straight tip. I'm telling you what I know about her. I'm her friend, else I couldn't do it."
"Don't ask me--how do I know? I suppose I couldn't stand seeing you waiting outside there, night after night, all for nothing."
She drew herself up, so that she seemed to be looking down at him; she seemed, with all her youth, to be older than he, to be no longer childlike and innocent and helpless. And her voice, her incomparable voice, had an edge to it; it was the voice of maturity, of experience, of the wisdom of the world.
"You can take it from me," said this voice, "that it doesn't do a man a bit of good to go on hanging about a girl and worrying her when she doesn't want him."
"Like you? As far as I know she likes you well enough."
"Then--for the life of me I can't see why--"
"Liking a man isn't wanting him. And you're not going the way to make Winny want you."
He had drawn up in the middle of the pavement just to consider whether, after all, there wasn't something in it.
"You're--you're not offended?" Her voice implored now and pleaded.
"Well--if you're sure you're not--would you mind seeing me home?"
She was all helpless again and childlike, and he liked her that way best.
"I don't like the streets," she explained. "I'm afraid of them. I mean I'm afraid of the people in them. They stare at me something awful. So horribly rude, isn't it, to stare?"
"As if there was something peculiar about me. Do _you_ see anything peculiar about me? Anything, I mean, to make them stare?"
They were advancing headlong toward intimacy and its embarrassments.
"Well, no," he said, "if you ask me--no, I don't. Except that, don't you know, you're--"
"Oh!" (She became more poignant than ever.) "You _do_, then--"
"No, I don't--on my honor I--I only meant that--well, you _are_ a bit out of the way, you know."
"Out of the way all round, I should fancy. Something rather wonderful."