had been shaken and stirred of late out of all his self-containment;
Prudence had heard many things from him.)

'You've made your amends,' she said. 'First by the things you've said to
her; and now you will be making them again by leaving her alone, as she
wishes. There's no other you can make. Don't you see?'

'I see I've got to,' he said harshly. 'I've been made to see that
clearly enough lately. Oh, I suppose I've got to accept it--sit down
under it.'

Prudence mused over it.

'It's been rather strange all along,' she said, more to herself than to
him. 'For we did our part to them, for good or evil, and they theirs to
us, by accident, and now that it's done we can't be of any more use to
each other, in the straits we're all, I suppose, in, through all we've
come to see and know. They want nothing of us, and we had better want
nothing of them; our uses for each other are over; there it is, you
see. They must leave us to help ourselves, and we must leave them to
help themselves and each other. And I hope we shall all do that; only it
will have to be along our own lines, not along other people's. You can't
step out of your own road into somebody else's; there are chasms
between, too wide to jump. And if you do manage to jump them, you don't
know the geography of the new road, and you only lose your way. I can't
help being stiff and puritanical and disliking certain things. They
can't help being--well, street-children of gregarious habits and wide
tastes. Why should they? It's merely being themselves. But though I may
be a prig, I can yet try to understand and not to keep aloof; and though
they may be--well, they can improve their roads too. It's always open to
us to improve our own roads--only not, I think, successfully to leave
them.'

Thus Prudence, working it out for her own satisfaction, her considering
brows puckered over the light that her thought had kindled in her
far-seeing, discerning artist's eyes. This side of it--the moral side,
the ultimate side, call it what you will--was of salient clearness to
her; it predominated, rising vividly out of the tangle of issues. It was
to her the thing that greatly mattered, that it was always open to us to
improve our own roads.

To Warren (the discrimination was partly, perhaps, one of sex, a good
deal between the idealist and one who was not, whatever he was, at all
an idealist) what may be called the moral aspect was obscured. He had
wanted something and had fai