"Well?" she said.
"I do not know how to say it," Philip responded slowly. "I am afraid that you have not much sympathy with my views of life."
"I probably have more than you realize. It's true that I do not believe as you do, but we are both Puritans at heart, so that in the end our theories come to much the same thing."
He looked up with evident inability to follow her meaning.
"I don't understand," he said.
"Very likely I couldn't make myself clear if I tried to explain. Suppose we give up abstractions and come to the concrete. What is the especial thing in which you think that my theories are different from yours?"
"I do not think," he answered, hesitating more than ever, "that you have much sympathy with asceticism."
"None whatever," she declared uncompromisingly. "Nobody could have more honor for a sacrifice to principle than I have; but I believe that a sacrifice to an idea is apt to be the outcome of nothing but vanity or policy."
"But what is the difference?"
"Why, an idea is a thing that we believe with the head; don't you know the way in which we think things out while we secretly feel altogether different?"