She now sat glowing and tingling with radiant health, leaning up against a rock that sheltered her from the blast that was screeching across the ledge of the mountain. She looked as cool, and as beautiful and unruffled, as if she had just dropped from the clouds, instead of climbing up to them by a most villainous path. There was always a sort of exotic splendour about her, and yet she never seemed out of place. “Are you never tired?” said her husband, as he was pouring some wine into a little silver cup. “Never! I don’t remember ever once having been tired.” “Looked at from the carnal mind of a chaperon, that was rather a nuisance, wasn’t it?” “It was; Lady Mary suffered a good deal from it. I used to try to accommodate myself to her in this matter and to look tired, but I never could manage it.” “Have another sandwich?” She went on in a reflective way as she ate it, “It is a wretched thing generally, for a woman to be absolutely untireable. A very strong woman is docked of half the privileges of her sex. If you notice the stock devoted husband, he has always a sickly creature of a wife to devote himself to—or one that poses as sickly—or if her body isn’t sickly, her brain is. You hardly ever find a woman quite sound in wind and limb and intellect, with an absolutely unselfish husband, ready to think all things for her, and to dance attendance on her to all eternity. Helplessness is such supreme flattery. I tell you, the modern man doesn’t like intellect any more than his fathers before him did, if it comes home too much to him.” “No! Sickliness and softness of brain don’t, however, appeal equally to all men.” “I suppose not; but the things they carry in their train do. The parasitical, gracious, leaning ways, the touch of pathos and pleading,—those are the things I should look for if I were a man, they charm me infinitely. Then that lovely craving for sympathy, and that delicious feeling of insecurity they float in, which makes the touch of strong hands a Heaven-sent boon to them—those women, you see, strew incense in your path and they get it back in service. When one hears of a devoted couple and is called on to admire with bated breath, I never can till I have dug out the reason of this devotion. I hate sticking up people on pinnacles, and then having to knock them down like a pair of nine-pins.” “Hero worship isn’t your tap evidently, but if one makes a principle of never smelling a flower or eating fruit until one has ascertained the manure used in its growth, one gets put off a lot. By the way, I haven’t noticed any marked symptoms of mental or physical decay in you, and yet, God knows and can possibly score up the number of your lovers—they certainly were beyond all human computation.” She flashed a quick untranslatable look at him and smiled.