"I can't," she mumbled, her mouth full, "unless perhaps it's this bread."
He passed the bottle to her and she drank from it sparingly, passing it to him again.
"Every wine is a vintage if you're thirsty enough," he added. "The trouble with our world is that most of its people are always about half full of food. You can't really enjoy things to eat or things to drink unless you're quite empty. It's the same thing with ideas. You can't think very clearly when you're half full of other people's biases."
"Or their b-bread and ch-cheese!" she said, choking. Further than that she did not reply at once. The reasons were obvious. But she munched reflectively, and when she had swallowed:
"If all your arguments are as convincing as your fare, then you and I shall never disagree," she said.
Clarissa, for that was the name she had given the beast, was turned loose in the meadow. Markham sat beside Hermia on the warm rock, and, between them, without further words, they finished both the wine and the food. Markham filled his pipe and stretched out at full length in lazy content while she sat beside him, brushing the dried cakes of mud from her skirt and stockings.
"Well, here we are across the Rubicon," she said at last.
He nodded.
"Are you sorry?"
"No, not in the least. I'm more astonished than anything else at the ridiculous simplicity of my emancipation. Yesterday at this hour I was a highly respectable if slightly pampered person with a shrewd sense of my own importance in the economic and social scheme; to-day I'm a mere biped—an instinct on legs, with nothing to recommend me but an amiable disposition and an abnormal appetite.