There was nothing to be done with Connie. And anyhow, if the man had been a lieutenant in the army in India for four or five years, he must be more or less presentable. Apparently he had character. Hilda began to relent a little.

“But you’ll be through with him in a while,” she said, “and then you’ll be ashamed of having been connected with him. One can’t mix up with the working people.”

“But you are such a socialist! You’re always on the side of the working classes.”

“I may be on their side in a political crisis, but being on their side makes me know how impossible it is to mix one’s life with theirs. Not out of snobbery, but just because the whole rhythm is different.”

Hilda had lived among the real political intellectuals, so she was disastrously unanswerable.