woman's faults? How could
she live half in another world and yet with all her absurd unworldliness
be so eminently a woman of this one? She was twenty-six, but she knew
what many women of fifty never learn; she was twenty-six, yet she was
more innocent than many a child of thirteen. What a contrast to Molly's
crude ignorance and hankering after success!

All the time he looked at her in silence and she did not seem to realise
it. She put her handkerchief into her belt and took it out again; she
touched her hair, seeing in the glass that it was untidy. Then she sat
down on a low stool, and her soft, fluffy black draperies fell round
her. She pressed her elbows on her knees, and sank her face in her
hands. She might have been alone; he was not quite sure she was not
praying. There were some moments of silence. At last she moved, raised
her head, and looked him gently full in the face.

"And you--you never talk about yourself," she said, with a thrill in her
voice that he had known so long. "I always talk so much of myself when I
am alone with you."

"No," he said, with a touch of lazy anger, "I'm not worth talking about,
not worth thinking of, and you know it!"

For a moment she flushed.

"You always have abused yourself."

"Because I know what's in your thoughts, and when I am with you I can't
help expressing them--there!" he concluded defiantly, and crossed and
uncrossed his legs again.

"Edmund, that isn't one bit, one little bit true. But I do wish you were
happier."

"Yes, of course," he went on sardonically, "you know that too. You know
that I loathe and detest life--that I hate the morning because it begins
a new day. Oh, I am bored to extinction, you know all that, you most
exasperating woman. I hate"--he suddenly seemed to see that he was
giving her pain, and the next words were muttered to himself--"no, I
love the pity in your eyes."

The graceful figure sitting there trembled a little, and the white hands
covered the eyes again.

"But," he went on quickly in a louder voice, "the pity's no good. You
might as well expect me to command an army to-morrow, or become an
efficient Prime Minister, or an Archbishop of Canterbury, or a Roman
Catholic Cardinal, or anything else that is impossible, as become the
sort of man you would like me to be. You know so perfectly well," he
laughed, "how rotten I am; you are astonished if you find me do any sort
of good--you can't help it, how can you, when it's just an