nd her beauty, more and more radiant in the
darkness, rose before him as a symbol of something vague which was yet
more beautiful than itself. "I may understand you to-morrow," he said,
"but I don't understand you now."

"And yet I took counsel with myself to-day and asked myself how I had
best speak to you. On one side I might have refused to see you at all."
Longmore made a violent movement, and she added: "In that case I should
have written to you. I might see you, I thought, and simply say to you
that there were excellent reasons why we should part, and that I begged
this visit should be your last. This I inclined to do; what made me
decide otherwise was--well, simply that I like you so. I said to myself
that I should be glad to remember in future days, not that I had, in the
horrible phrase, got rid of you, but that you had gone away out of the
fulness of your own wisdom and the excellence of your own taste."

"Ah wisdom and taste!" the poor young man wailed.

"I'm prepared, if necessary," Madame de Mauves continued after a pause,
"to fall back on my strict right. But, as I said before, I shall be
greatly disappointed if I'm obliged to do that."

"When I listen to your horrible and unnatural lucidity," Longmore
answered, "I feel so angry, so merely sore and sick, that I wonder I
don't leave you without more words."

"If you should go away in anger this idea of mine about our parting
would be but half-realised," she returned with no drop in her ardour.
"No, I don't want to think of you as feeling a great pain, I don't want
even to think of you as making a great sacrifice. I want to think of
you--"

"As a stupid brute who has never existed, who never CAN exist!" he broke
in. "A creature who could know you without loving you, who could leave
you without for ever missing you!"

She turned impatiently away and walked to the other end of the terrace.
When she came back he saw that her impatience had grown sharp and almost
hard. She stood before him again, looking at him from head to foot
and without consideration now; so that as the effect of it he felt his
assurance finally quite sink. This then she took from him, withholding
in consequence something she had meant to say. She moved off afresh,
walked to the other end of the terrace and stood there with her face to
the garden. She assumed that he understood her, and slowly, slowly, half
as the fruit of this mute pressure, he let everything go but the rage of
a pu