'You're so easily pleased,' she answered. 'People have only to be nice
to you and you think the whole world is Heaven.'

'So it is with you, chicken.'

'Oh! Don't be so pleased! Don't be so pleased! Do lose your temper
with me sometimes! I'm not a child.'

'But they _were_ nice people.'

'They weren't. They were dreadful people. They were only there
because they think you _may_ succeed, and then there will be jobs for
them all.'

'You see through people so much that you forget they are people at all.'

'That comes from living with you. I have to see through you to realise
that you are a person....'

'Oh! I _am_ a person then?'

'Only to me.... You reflect everybody else.'

'They are not worth more.'

'They are. Everybody is. If only you would be yourself to them, they
would be themselves.'

'Oh!'

She had stung him, as she so often did, into self-realisation and
self-criticism, a process so painful that, left to himself, he avoided
it altogether.... He walked along moodily. They were crossing St
James's Park. On the bridge he stopped, looked down into the water and
said gloomily.

'I sometimes think that my soul is as placid and still and shallow as
that water, and that you, like all the rest, have only seen your own
reflection in me.... That's why I like the comfort of restlessness and
change. Anything to break the stillness.'

'You couldn't say that if it were true,' she said.

'No. I suppose not,' and, with one of his astonishing changes of mood,
he took her arm and began to talk of the day when he had first met her
in Picquart's studio, where everybody was gay and lively except they
two, so that he talked to her, and seemed to have been talking for ever
and had no idea of ever ceasing to do so. And then he told her how
better than even talking to her was being silent with her, and how all
kinds of ideas in him that had been too shy to appear in solitude or
with others had come tumbling out like notes of music because of her.

'I've nearly forgotten,' he said, 'what being in love is like. This
was at the farthest end of love from that, something entirely new, so
new as to be altogether outside life. I have had to grope back into it
again.'

'I liked you,' said she, 'because you were English.'

'Did you?' He was puzzled. 'I thought that was precisely what I am
not.'

Neither could be angry for very long, and neither could be rancorous.
The enchantment in which they li