escape in some casual gardening remark. But Augustine,
unsuspecting, was interested in their theme.

"Good? I don't know," he said. "I don't think it's goodness, exactly.
It's that I so loathe the other thing, so loathe the animal I know in
myself, so loathe the idea of life at the mercy of emotion."

She had to leave the roses and walk on again beside him, steeling
herself to bear whatever might be coming. And, feeling that unconscious
accusation loomed, she tried, as unconsciously, to mollify and evade it.

"It isn't always the animal, exactly, is it?--or emotion only? It is
romance and blind love for a person that leads people astray."

"Isn't that the animal?" Augustine inquired. "I don't think the animal
base, you know, or shameful, if he is properly harnessed and kept in his
place. It's only when I see him dominating that I hate and fear him so.
And," he went on after a little pause of reflection, "I especially hate
him in that form;--romance and blind love: because what is that, really,
but the animal at its craftiest and most dangerous? what is romance--I
mean romance of the kind that jeopardizes 'goodness'--what is it but the
most subtle self-deception? You don't love the person in the true sense
of love; you don't want their good; you don't want to see them put in
the right relation to their life as a whole:--what you want is sensation
through them; what you want is yourself in them, and their absorption in
you. I don't think that wicked, you know--I'm not a monk or even a
puritan--if it's the mere result of the right sort of love, a happy
glamour that accompanies, the right sort; it's in its place, then, and
can endanger nothing. But people are so extraordinarily blind about
love; they don't seem able to distinguish between the real and the
false. People usually, though they don't know it, mean only desire when
they talk of love."

There was another pause in which she wondered that he did not hear the
heavy throbbing of her heart. But now there was no retreat; she must go
on; she must understand her son. "Desire must enter in," she said.

"In its place, yes; it's all a question of that;" Augustine replied,
smiling a little at her, aware of the dogmatic flavour of his own
utterances, the humorous aspect of their announcement, to her, by
him;--"You love a woman enough and respect her enough to wish her to be
the mother of your children--assuming, of course, that you consider
yourself worthy to carry on th