"Oh, I suppose we both know why that is," she said. "We needn't mention names, but—"
"Well, we know how it is even if we don't know why it is; but it isn't all Miss Pinsent, or—" He paused an instant and ended with a question. "Or why doesn't he settle down there?"
She seemed to consider his question, but shook her head as though she found no answer. To adduce the obvious objection, the Fenning objection, seemed inconsistent with the sincerity into which their talk had drifted.
"I tell you what," said Bowdon, "I'm beginning to think that it doesn't much matter what sort a man is, but he ought to be one sort or the other. Don't you know what I mean?"
She walked by his side in silence again for a few minutes, then she turned to him.
"Are we contemptuous, or are we envious, or what are we, we people of one sort?" she asked.
"On my honour I don't know," answered Bowdon, shaking his head and laughing a little.
"I think I'm contemptuous," she said, and looked in his face to find an equal candour. But he did not give his decision; he would not admit that he inclined still a little towards the mood of envy. "Anyhow it must be strange to be like that," she said; she had thought the same thing before when she sat in the theatre, watching Ora Pinsent act. Then she had watched with an outside disinterested curiosity in the study of a being from another world who could not, as it had seemed, make any difference to her world or to her; but Ora had made differences for her, or at least had brought differences to light. So the various lines of life run in and out, now meeting and now parting, each following its own curve, lead where it may.