we are now."

"Where we were yesterday, you mean."

"Yes. We were good enough friends yesterday."

"And what are we to-day? Enemies?"

She smiled sadly. "It looks like it. At any rate, we seem to have
some difficulty in understanding each other."

"Good God! how coolly you talk about it! Understanding! Do you never
feel? Has it never even occurred to you that I can feel? Have you
any notion what it is to be made of flesh and blood and nerves, and
to have to stay here, squeezed up in this confounded boat, where I
can't get away from you?"

"You can get away in three-quarters of an hour, and meanwhile, if
you like, you can go below."

"If I did go below I should still feel you walking over my head. I
should hear you breathe. And now to look at you and touch you, and
know all the time that something sticks between us----"

He stopped and looked before him. It was true that the sea had
brought them together. Amid the daemonic triumph and jubilation of
the power that claimed them for its own they, the man and the woman,
had been thrown on each other, they had looked into each other's
eyes, spirit to spirit, the divine thing struggling blind and
uncertain in nature's tangled mesh. But now, so near, on the verge
of the intangible, the divine, it came over Durant that after all it
was this their common nature, their flesh and blood, that was the
barrier; it merged them with the world on every side, but it hedged
them in and hid them from each other.

"As you know, we're the best friends in the world; there's only one
thing that sticks between us--the eternal difference in our points
of view."

"I was perfectly right. Why couldn't I trust my first impressions? I
thought you frigid and lucid and inhuman----"

"Inhuman?"

"Well, not a bit like a woman."

"My dear Maurice, you are very like a man."

"There's something about you----"

"Really? What is it, do you think?"

"Oh, nothing; a slight defect, that's all. It must be as you say,
and as I always thought, that you are incapable of feeling or
understanding feeling. I repeat, there's something about you----"

"Ah, Maurice, if you want the truth, there's something about _you_.
I always knew, I felt that it was in you, though I wouldn't own that
it was there. Now I am sure. You've been doing your best to make me
sure."

"What have I made you sure of?"

"Sure that you are incapable, not of loving perhaps, but of loving a
certain kind of woman the way she