The Belfry

She hadn't been in that room five minutes before she had created a situation; a situation that bristled with difficulty and danger.

To begin with, she was so young. She couldn't have been, then, a day older than one-and-twenty. My first instinct (at least, I suppose it was my first) was to send her away; to tell her that I was afraid she wouldn't do, that she was too unpunctual, and that I had found, between nine-thirty and ten o'clock, somebody who would suit me rather better. Any lie I could think of, so long as I got out of it. So long as I got her out of it.

I don't know how it was she so contrived to impress me as being in for something, some impetuous adventure, some enterprise of enormous uncertainty. It may have been because she looked so well-cared-for and expensive. I do not understand these matters, but her furs, and her tailor-made suit of dark cloth, and the little black velvet hat with the fur tail in it were not the sort of clothes I had hitherto seen worn by typi