"Ah, but I know—well, if you won't you won't—but if you knew how much I loved you you'd feel that you were cruel not to let me help you."
"Dear Dr. Chris—but there is nothing."
But her eyes were full of tears.
"Look here," he said. "Perhaps you'll feel later on you can talk to me. Just come straight away if you do feel that."
He went on. "Don't be frightened, my dear, if there are a whole heap of new emotions, new instincts, stirred in you by marriage. Just take them all as they come. It's all progress, you know. Don't be frightened of anything. Just take the animal by the head and look at it."
That led him to speak about Brun's Tiger. He explained it—the force in people, the way they either grappled with the creature, and at last trained it to help them with their work in the world, or ignored it, silenced it, allowed it at last to die, and so, cosy and lazily comfortable, passed to their day's end, but had, nevertheless, missed the whole purpose of life.
He enlarged on that and showed the connection of the individual Tiger with the welfare of the world, so that everyone who denied his Tiger added to his world's muddle and confusion, and at last there would come an inevitable crisis when war would spring up between those who had grappled with their Tiger and those who had not.
"One knows one's own Tiger—absolutely of oneself one knows it and has, of oneself, the choice whether to grapple or not—at least that's what I gathered he meant—I know it struck me at the time."
"Oh," she said, with a sigh that quivered through her whole body. "It's so easy to talk.... But it's true what he says. I know it."
At last Christopher got up to go. He did not know whether he had done any good; he felt that he was a miserable failure, and he had a foreboding that one day he would be ashamed indeed that he had not helped her.