If you can't put up with people you
might love nature. I--I can't be content with nature, because I want
some life first. Up in Whindale there is too much nature, not enough
life. But if I had got through life--if it had disappointed me--then I
should love nature. I keep saying to the mountains at home: "Not _now_,
not _now_; I want something else, but afterwards if I can't get it, or
if I get too much of it, why then I will love you, live with you. You
are my second string, my reserve. You--and art--and poetry."'

'But everything depends on feeling,' he said softly, but lightly, as
though to keep the conversation from slipping back into those vague
depths it had emerged from; 'and if one has forgotten how to feel--if
when one sees or hears something beautiful that used to stir one, one
can only say "I remember it moved me once!"--if feeling dies, like life,
like physical force, but prematurely, long before the rest of the man!'

She gave a long quivering sigh of passionate antagonism.

'Oh, I cannot imagine it!' she cried. 'I shall feel to my last hour.'
Then, after a pause, in another tone, 'But, Mr. Langham, you say music
excites you, Wagner excites you?'

'Yes, a sort of strange second life I can still get out of music,' he
admitted, smiling.

'Well then,' and she looked at him persuasively, 'why not give yourself
up to music? It is so easy--so little trouble to one's self--it just
takes you and carries you away.'

Then, for the first time, Langham became conscious--probably through
these admonitions of hers--that the situation had absurdity in it.

'It is not my _metier_,' he said hastily. 'The self that enjoys music is
an outer self, and can only bear with it for a short time. No, Miss
Leyburn, I shall leave Oxford, the college will sing a _Te Deum_, I
shall settle down in London, I shall keep a big book going, and cheat
the years after all, I suppose, as well as most people.'

'And you will know, you will remember,' she said faltering, reddening,
her womanliness forcing the words out of her, 'that you have friends:
Robert--my sister--all of us?'

He faced her with a little quick movement. And as their eyes met each
was struck once more with the personal beauty of the other. His eyes
shone--their black depths seemed all tenderness.

'I will never forget this visit, this garden, this hour,' he said
slowly, and they stood looking at each other. Rose felt herself swept
off her feet into a world of tragic