talked--as young men talk
together.

We talked of religion; I think she was the first person to thaw the
private silences that had kept me bound in these matters even from
myself for years. I can still recall her face, a little flushed and
coming nearer to mine after avowals and comparisons. "But Stephen," she
says; "if none of these things are really true, why do they keep on
telling them to us? What is true? What are we for? What is Everything
for?"

I remember the awkwardness I felt at these indelicate thrusts into
topics I had come to regard as forbidden.

"I suppose there's a sort of truth in them," I said, and then more
Siddonsesquely: "endless people wiser than we are----"

"Yes," she said. "But that doesn't matter to us. Endless people wiser
than we are have said one thing, and endless people wiser than we are
have said exactly the opposite. It's _we_ who have to understand--for
ourselves.... We don't understand, Stephen."

I was forced to a choice between faith and denial. But I parried with
questions. "Don't you," I asked, "feel there is a God?"

She hesitated. "There is something--something very beautiful," she said
and stopped as if her breath had gone. "That is all I know, Stephen...."

And I remember too that we talked endlessly about the things I was to do
in the world. I do not remember that we talked about the things she was
to do, by some sort of instinct and some sort of dexterity she evaded
that, from the very first she had reserves from me, but my career and
purpose became as it were the form in which we discussed all the
purposes of life. I became Man in her imagination, the protagonist of
the world. At first I displayed the modest worthy desire for respectable
service that Harbury had taught me, but her clear, sceptical little
voice pierced and tore all those pretences to shreds. "Do some decent
public work," I said, or some such phrase.

"But is that All you want?" I hear her asking. "Is that All you want?"

I lay prone upon the turf and dug up a root of grass with my penknife.
"Before I met you it was," I said.

"And now?"

"I want you."

"I'm nothing to want. I want you to want all the world.... _Why
shouldn't you?_"

I think I must have talked of the greatness of serving the empire. "Yes,
but splendidly," she insisted. "Not doing little things for other
people--who aren't doing anything at all. I want you to conquer people
and lead people.... When I see you, Stephen, sometime