"I detest it, as it happens. If you want to see me in the high heroic rôle, which I infer you admire, you must devise a temptation of another sort." "I think your dear little sex should be protected from all temptation. I rather like the Oriental way of doing things." "Don't you flatter yourself that a wall fifteen feet high, and covered with broken glass, would protect a woman from temptations, if she wanted them. A man, to keep a woman inside that wall, must embody all the temptations himself." Thorpe looked at her, and drew his brows together. "That was a curious remark for a girl to make," he said, coldly. "You mean it would be if I were English. But I am not only American, but Californian, born and brought up in a city where they are trying to be civilised and succeeding indifferently well. Do you suppose I can help seeing what life is? I should be next door to an idiot if I could." "I hardly know whether you would be more interesting if you had been brought up in England. No," he added, reflectively, after a moment, "I don't think you would be." "What you really think is, that I should not be half so interesting, but much more ideal." "If I thought anything of the sort, it was by a purely mechanical process," he said, reddening. "I have lived out of England too much to be insular in all my notions." "I don't believe an Englishman ever changes on certain points, of which woman is one; heredity is too strong. If you sat down and thought it all over, you'd find that although you could generalise on a more liberal scale than some of your countrymen, your own personal ideals were much the same as theirs." "Possibly, but as I don't intend to marry till I'm forty,--when I intend to stand for Parliament,--I'm not bothering about ideals at present." "That was a more insular remark than you evidently imagine. However--speaking of ideals, I should say that California generated them more liberally than any other country--through sheer force of contrast. I have grown rather morbid on the subject of good people, myself. I grow more exacting every month of my life; and the first thing I look for in a new man's face is to see, first, whether he has a mind, and then, whether it controls all the rest of him. I've seen too much of practical life to have indulged much in dreams and heroes; but I've let my imagination go somewhat, and I picture a man with all the virtues that you don't see in combination out here, and living with him in some old European city where there are narrow crooked streets, and beautiful architecture, and the most exquisite music in the cathedrals." Her voice had rattled on lightly, and she smiled more than once during her long speech. But her eyes did not smile; they had a curious, almost hard, intentness which forced Thorpe to believe that her brain was casting up something more than the froth of a passing mood.