t; partly because he always spoke with force, for
what reason she did not yet feel certain.

"Absolute sincerity is rather difficult, don't you think?" she inquired,
with a touch of irony.

"There are people one credits even with that," he replied a little
vaguely. He was ashamed of his savage wish to hurt her, and yet it was
not for the sake of hurting her, who was beyond his shafts, but in order
to mortify his own incredibly reckless impulse of abandonment to the
spirit which seemed, at moments, about to rush him to the uttermost ends
of the earth. She affected him beyond the scope of his wildest dreams.
He seemed to see that beneath the quiet surface of her manner, which was
almost pathetically at hand and within reach for all the trivial demands
of daily life, there was a spirit which she reserved or repressed for
some reason either of loneliness or--could it be possible--of love. Was
it given to Rodney to see her unmasked, unrestrained, unconscious of her
duties? a creature of uncalculating passion and instinctive freedom? No;
he refused to believe it. It was in her loneliness that Katharine was
unreserved. "I went back to my room by myself and I did--what I liked."
She had said that to him, and in saying it had given him a glimpse of
possibilities, even of confidences, as if he might be the one to share
her loneliness, the mere hint of which made his heart beat faster and
his brain spin. He checked himself as brutally as he could. He saw her
redden, and in the irony of her reply he heard her resentment.

He began slipping his smooth, silver watch in his pocket, in the hope
that somehow he might help himself back to that calm and fatalistic mood
which had been his when he looked at its face upon the bank of the lake,
for that mood must, at whatever cost, be the mood of his intercourse
with Katharine. He had spoken of gratitude and acquiescence in the
letter which he had never sent, and now all the force of his character
must make good those vows in her presence.

She, thus challenged, tried meanwhile to define her points. She wished
to make Denham understand.

"Don't you see that if you have no relations with people it's easier to
be honest with them?" she inquired. "That is what I meant. One needn't
cajole them; one's under no obligation to them. Surely you must have
found with your own family that it's impossible to discuss what matters
to you most because you're all herded together, because you're in a
cons