She continued—.
"Sometimes one meets certain people who have sufficient of the divine ferment in their heads to be called alive: they are almost always men. We fly to them as to our own people. We abase ourselves before them in happy humility. We crave to be allowed to live near them in order that we may be assured that everything in the world is not nonsense and machinery—and then, what do we find—?"
She paused, and turned a large fierce eye upon me.
"I do not know," said I, and I endeavoured vainly to look everywhere but at her eye.
"We find always that they are married," said she, and, saying so, she lapsed again to a tense and worried reflection.
"You have not told me," I insisted gently, "why you peer earnestly into space, and thump at intervals upon your knee with the heel of your fist?"
"These men," said she sternly, "are surrounded by their wives. They are in gaol and their wives are their warders. You cannot go to them without a permit. You may not speak to them without a listener. You may not argue with them for fear of raising an alien and ridiculous hostility. Scarcely can you even look at them without reproach.—How then can we live, and how will the torch of life be kept alight?"
"I do not know," I murmured.
She turned her pale eye to me again.
"I am not beautiful," said she.