and looked wildly
at Benjulia. "Ha! you don't understand loving and kissing, do you?
What's the use of speaking to _you_ about my old nurse?"

He pointed imperatively to the sofa. "Sit down again."

She obeyed him--but he had not quite composed her yet. Her eyes
sparkled; she went on talking. "Ah, you're a hard man! a miserable man!
a man that will end badly! You never loved anybody. You don't know what
love is."

"What is it?"

That icy question cooled her in an instant: her head sank on her bosom:
she suddenly became indifferent to persons and things about her. "When
will Teresa come?" she whispered to herself. "Oh, when will Teresa
come!"

Any other man, whether he really felt for her or not, would, as a mere
matter of instinct, have said a kind word to her at that moment. Not the
vestige of a change appeared in Benjulia's impenetrable composure. She
might have been a man--or a baby--or the picture of a girl instead of
the girl herself, so far as he was concerned. He quietly returned to his
question.

"Well," he resumed--"and what is love?"

Not a word, not a movement escaped her.

"I want to know," he persisted, waiting for what might happen.

Nothing happened. He was not perplexed by the sudden change. "This is
the reaction," he thought. "We shall see what comes of it." He looked
about him. A bottle of water stood on one of the tables. "Likely to be
useful," he concluded, "in case she feels faint."

Zo had been listening; Zo saw her way to getting noticed again. Not
quite sure of herself this time, she appealed to Carmina. "Didn't he
say, just now, he wanted to know?"

Carmina neither heard nor heeded her. Zo tried Benjulia next. "Shall
I tell you what we do in the schoolroom, when we want to know?" His
attention, like Carmina's attention, seemed to be far away from her. Zo
impatiently reminded him of her presence--she laid her hand on his knee.

It was only the hand of a child--an idle, quaint, perverse child--but
it touched, ignorantly touched, the one tender place in his nature,
unprofaned by the infernal cruelties which made his life acceptable to
him; the one tender place, hidden so deep from the man himself, that
even his far-reaching intellect groped in vain to find it out.
There, nevertheless, was the feeling which drew him to Zo, contending
successfully with his medical interest in a case of nervous derangement.
That unintelligible sympathy with a child looked dimly out of his eyes,
spoke f