to Miss
Tancred's way.

At last she spoke.

"It's odd how some people take Nature," said she; "for instance,
Mrs. Fazakerly says she loves it because it's so soothing. She might
just as well say she liked listening to an orchestra because it
sends her to sleep. She can't love it for its own sake."

"You'll think me horribly rude, but I doubt if any woman can. That
is the one thing a woman is incapable of--a pure passion for Nature,
a really disinterested love of life. It's an essentially masculine
sentiment."

"I don't at all agree with you."

"Don't you? To begin with, it argues more vitality than most women
have got. They take to it as a substitute for other things; and to
be content with it would mean that they had exhausted, outlived the
other things."

"What other things?"

She was studying every line of his young, repugnant face, and Durant
was a little embarrassed by her steady gaze.

"Other interests, other feelings--whatever it is that women do care
for most."

"I don't know anything about women."

Her remark might have borne various interpretations, either that she
knew nothing about herself, that she despised her own sex too much
to include herself in it, or that she had tacitly adopted Durant's
attitude, which seemed to leave her altogether outside of the
discussion. He talked to her unconsciously, without any desire to
please, as if he assumed that she expected as little from him as he
from her. She never reminded him that she was a woman. It would have
been absurd if she had insisted on it, and whatever she was Miss
Tancred was not absurd.

She went on calmly, "So I can't say what they care for most; can
you?"

"You know my opinion. I wanted yours."

"Mine isn't worth much. But I should say that in these things no two
women were alike. You talk as if they were all made of the same
stuff."

"So they are inside--in their souls, I mean."

"There's more unlikeness in their souls, I imagine, than there ever
is in their bodies; and you wouldn't say an ugly woman was quite the
same as a pretty one, would you?"

"Yes; in the obvious sense that they are both women. I admit that
there may be an ugliness that cancels sex, to say nothing of a
beauty that transcends it; but in either case the woman is unique."

"And if the woman, why not her soul?"

"Because--because--because there is a certain psychical quality that
is eternal and unchangeable; because the soul is the seat of the
cosmic dif