"Both," she said, and laughed heartily, and became swiftly grave again, and came up to him and took both his hands, an unwonted action that brought the color to his cheeks; "don't you see, my dear friend, that if we were to marry I should plague your life out, and you would never write another note of music, and Mrs. Reginald Routh and all the others would point at me with invective? And you would bore me to the verge of extinction in a month! Of course if you didn't like me it might work better, because then I should have to make you fall in love with me, and that would prevent it from being such a deadly dull affair. Or if I hated you I might do it, because then we could live our separate lives, and there would be nothing to spoil. Don't you see how marriage always spoils things? It is never romantic; it is expedient, that's all. It does for people who are not fond of one another, or for people who do not feel such things; but for two people who are in love, and one of them a hypersensitive musician--bah! it would be madness! Not that I am in love, of course." He chose to ignore the feminine way in which she concluded, and as she dropped his hands and swung away from him, he found himself feeling for his tobacco pouch, and he reflected that the courtship was not much more romantic than the married life she pictured. "Then you believe in perpetual engagements?" he asked, for the sake of saying something. "Not a bit of it," she replied gayly, leaning over the broken wall and watching the creatures in the water below; "engagements simply mean all the conventional drawbacks without the moral conveniences. No, there is only one way out of it, and that won't work when you come to examine it." "And what is that?" he asked, like a man, rashly. "To marry some one who doesn't matter, and be in love with some one else," she replied carelessly, and kept her face averted. He rolled up his cigarette and lighted it, and wondered whether women ever discussed among themselves these subjects which they had no diffidence in approaching with men. "No, it would hardly work, I am afraid," he said slowly. "Lady Joan, it is an absurdly old-fashioned thing to say, but do you know I fancy, after all, that marriage is the only way out of it?" She turned round and faced him with hot cheeks and angry eyes. "I think you are merely abusing your privilege as my friend," she cried; "I am not going to stay here for you to draw me out and then--then laugh at me. It is time we closed this--this absurd interview, and I wish--I wish I had known you were here before I started for my walk. Do you suppose that _I_ would say anything to _you_ that the whole world might not hear?"