Gwynne laughed. "Schopenhauer suits you better when you are out on the marsh in rubber boots and a shooting-jacket. Do you realize that if you persist in this determination to camp permanently in the outer--and frigid--zone, you will never be the centre of a life drama? That, I take it, is what every woman desires most. You had a sort of curtain-raiser--to my mind, hardly that. First love is merely the more picturesque successor of measles and whooping-cough. In marriage it may develop into something worth while, but in itself amounts to nothing--except as material for poets. But the real drama--that is in the permanent relation. This relation is the motive power of the great known dramas of the world. Life is packed with little unheard of dramas of precisely the same sort--the eternal duet of sex; nothing else keeps it going. Now, it is positive that a woman cannot have a drama all by herself--" "Not a drama in the old style. But that is what we are trying to avoid. Are there not other faculties? What has civilization done for the world if it is to be everlastingly sex-ridden? What is the meaning of this multitude of faculties that progress has developed? What is the meaning of life itself--" "Oh, are you aiming to read the riddle of life?" "I mean to pass my own life in the effort. Men have failed. It is our turn. But if I say any more I suppose you will pinch me again." "No," said Gwynne, smiling. "I feel much more like kissing you--ah!" He had the satisfaction of seeing her eyes blaze. His pipe was finished; he clasped his hands behind his head and almost lay down in his deep chair. "I am just tired enough to be completely happy, and if I can look at you I am willing to listen like a lamb all night." "And be convinced of nothing." Isabel tossed her head and returned to her chair. It faced him and he could still look at her. They watched each other from opposite sides of the hearth with something of the unblinking wariness of a dog and a cat, and no doubt had they possessed caudal appendages they would have lashed them slowly.