'Do you know, Theo,' she said, after a little pause, 'that you are the greatest puzzle I have ever come across?'
'I am sorry,' he murmured, with mock humility.
'Oh, don't apologize! I dare say it is entirely unintentional. What I cannot understand is your nonchalant way of talking of certain things. For instance, nothing seems to be farther from your thoughts at this moment than the possibility of your being ... killed.'
He chipped off the head of a withered thistle with his stick before replying in a low, steady voice, very deliberately:
'And yet nothing is nearer to them.'
'That is what I cannot understand. I think women look farther ahead. They seem to have the power of realizing at the beginning what the end may be—realizing it more fully than men, I mean.'
'I doubt it!' he answered. 'I have to make two sets of arrangements, two sets of plans. One takes it for granted that I shall come through it all safely, the other goes upon the theory that I shall be killed. Each is complete in itself, independent of its companion. When I say that I will do something at a certain time, or be in a certain place, there is a "D.V." understood, hidden between the lines. Everything is of course "Deo volente," but you would not have me drag it in obtrusively.'
'No ... naturally not. But what I cannot understand is your power of facing the two possibilities—or, at the least, the latter—with apparent indifference. Is that the difference that exists between the courage of a man and that of a woman?'
'No,' he replied, looking at her very gravely, and speaking in a tone which gave weight to words of apparently small importance; 'I think not, for women face possibilities and even certainties with equal pluck. It requires as much courage to remain at home and wait as it does to go out and face the danger, for danger is never so unpleasant as the anticipation of it.'
She remembered these words afterwards, and recognised then the fuller sense he had intended them to convey. In the meantime, however, she held to her point.