tsman without a horse....
You've got work to do--blood in your veins. I'm not one of your ignorant
women, Stephen. You ought to have a wife...."

"Rachel's too good," I said, at the end of a pause and perceiving I had
to say something, "to be that sort of wife."

"No woman's too good for a man," said the Fuerstin von Letzlingen with
conviction. "It's what God made her for."

Sec. 4

My visit to Boppard was drawing to an end before I had a clear
opportunity to have things out with Rachel. It was in a little garden,
under the very shadow of that gracious cathedral at Worms, the sort of
little garden to which one is admitted by ringing a bell and tipping a
custodian. I think Worms is in many respects one of the most beautiful
cathedrals I have ever seen, so perfectly proportioned, so delicately
faded, so aloof, so free from pride or presumption, and it rises over
this green and flowery peace, a towering, lithe, light brown, sunlit,
easy thing, as unconsciously and irrelevantly splendid as a tall ship in
the evening glow under a press of canvas. We looked up at it for a time
and then went on with the talk to which we had been coming slowly since
the Fuerstin had packed us off for it, while she went into the town with
Berwick to buy toys for her gatekeeper's children. I had talked about
myself, and the gradual replacement of my ambition to play a part in
imperial politics by wider intentions. "You know," I asked abruptly,
"why I left England?"

She thought through the briefest of pauses. "No," she decided at last.

"I made love," I said, "to Lady Mary Justin, and we were found out. We
couldn't go away together----"

"Why not?" she interjected.

"It was impossible."

For some moments neither of us spoke. "Something," she said, and then,
"Some vague report," and left these fragments to be her reply.

"We were old playmates; we were children together. We
have--something--that draws us to each other. She--she made a mistake in
marrying. We were both very young and the situation was difficult. And
then afterwards we were thrown together.... But you see that has made a
great difference to my life; it's turned me off the rails on which men
of my sort usually run. I've had to look to these other things....
They've become more to me than to most people if only because of
that...."

"You mean these ideas of yours--learning as much as you can about the
world, and then doing what you can to help other people to a better