"Yes. And you?"
"I like Adam Lindsay Gordon better. Omar is apt to undermine a strong purpose. Gordon inspires one."
"Doesn't Omar help one to see things as they are, and dare to be strong in spite of it, while Gordon avoids many essentials, and writes chiefly of how we would have things be?"
"But surely the inspiration is the chief thing. The man who inspires is better than the man who reveals, and in revealing unnerves." She was silent, and he added, "I suppose it is the difference between the æsthetic and the practical, and so they appeal to the æsthetic or the practical side of man."
She wondered if it were possible such as he should have an æsthetic side, and presently said:
"You are all practical, I should imagine."
He glanced at her half humorously. "I wonder why you say that?"
"I don't know, except that one does not usually associate æstheticism and strength." Another man might have asked her if she was satisfied he was strong, but Carew only looked to the horizon. He was asking it of himself instead.
And he asked it, because he was leaning there beside her, alone on the kopje top. Suddenly yielding to an impulse he did not seek to analyse, he said quietly, "I have never been a great reader of poetry, but long ago I was engaged to be married, to some one who cared very much for it. Omar was one of her favourites, and sixteen years ago he was very little known compared with to-day."
Meryl felt the colour ebbing from her face, and averted her eyes. Without any telling, she knew that this woman he had loved sixteen years ago was the cause of that mysterious shadow on his life to-day. When she felt she had complete control of her voice, she asked, "And you were never able to be married?"