wants to be loved. You can't help
it. As I said before, it is the difference in the point of view. We
should get no nearer if we talked till doomsday."

"My point of view, as you call it, has entirely changed."

"No. It is I who have changed. Your point of view is, and always
will be, the same."

He tried hard to understand.

"Does it come to this--that if I had loved you then you would have
loved me now?"

"You couldn't have loved me then. You were not that sort."

He understood her meaning and it maddened him. "It wasn't my fault.
How the devil was I to see?"

"Exactly, how were you? There are some things which you can't see.
You can see everything you can paint, and, as you are a very clever
artist, I dare say you can paint most things you can see."

"What has that got to do with it?"

"Everything. It's your way all through. You love me because what you
see of me is changed. And yet all that time I was the same woman I
am now. I am the same woman I was then."

"But I am not the same man!"

"The very same. You have not changed at all."

She meant that he was deficient in that spiritual imagination which
was her special power; she meant that she had perceived the implicit
baseness of his earlier attitude as a man to her as a woman, a woman
who had had no power to touch his senses. It was, as she had said,
the difference in their points of view; hers had condemned him
forever to the sensual and the seen.

He stood ashamed before her.

Yet, as if she had divined his shame and measured the anguish of it
and repented her, she laid her hand on his arm.

"Maurice, it isn't entirely so. I have been horribly unjust."

"Not you! You are justice incarnate. If I had loved you then----"

"You couldn't have loved me then."

"So you have just told me."

"You had good cause. I was not and could not be then--whatever it is
that you love now."

"But I might have seen----"

"Seen? Seen? That's it. There was nothing to see."

Her eyes, in her pity for him, filled with tears, tears that in his
anger he could not understand.

"Why are you always reminding me of what I was five years ago? I
_have_ changed. Can't a man change if you give him five years to do
it in?"

"Perhaps. It's a long time."

"Time? It's an eternity. If I was a brute to you, do you suppose the
consciousness of my brutality isn't a far worse punishment than
anything I could have made you feel?"

She raised her eyebrows. "What? Have you