There fell one of the silences that usually came when Mr. Strong lost interest in a subject. Merely adding, "Oh, I've not a word to say against Prang, but----," he began to rise and fall on his toes again. Then he stepped to the Benares table where the casts were. But he made no criticism of them. He picked the foot up, and put it down again. "I like it," he said, and returned once more to the asbestos hearth. The silence fell again. Amory, sitting on the footstool with her knees supporting her elbows and her wrists supporting her chin, would have liked to offer Mr. Strong a penny for his thoughts. She had had an odd, warm little sensation when he had picked up that cast of the perfect foot. She supposed he must know that it was her foot, but so widely had his thoughts been ranging that he had merely put it down again with an abstracted "I like it." Amory was not sure that any other woman than herself would not have been piqued. Any other woman would have expected him either not to look at the thing, or else to say that it was small, or to ask whether the real one was as white, or something foolish like that. But Amory was superior to such things. She lived on higher levels. On these levels such an affront to the pure intellect as a flirtation could not exist. Free Love as a logical and defensible system--yes, perhaps; or a combination so happy of marriage and cohabitation as that of the Wyrons'--yes again; but anything lower she left to the stupid people who swallowed the conventions whole, including the convention of not being found out.--So she merely wondered about their relation again. Obviously, there must be a relation. And yet his own explanation had been quite insufficient; it had been no explanation at all to ask her whether she had read "_The Tragic Comedians_" or whether she had Edward Carpenter in the house. No doubt it was flattering to her intelligence to suppose that she could "flash" at his meaning without further words on his part, but it was also a little irritating when the flash didn't come. And, now that she came to think of it, except that he allowed it to be inferred that he found Britomart Belchamber a bit lumpish, she didn't know what he thought, not merely of herself, but of women at all. And yet there was a passed-through-the-furnace look about him that might have piqued any woman. It was not conceivable that his eyes had softened only over inspired passages in proof, or that the tenderest speeches his lips had shaped had been the "Novum's" rallying-cries to the devoted band of the New Imperialists. Amory was sure that his memory must be a maze of things, less spacious perhaps, but far more interesting than these. He looked widely now, but must have looked close and intense too. He pronounced upon the Empire, but, for all he was not married, must have probed deep into the palpitating human heart as well.