"Not to-morrow, perhaps. When I send. Was it _young_ Doctor Enderby?" They had rather a sad, dry parting; and when her door closed upon him he felt that it had shut him out forever. His shame and his defeat were so great that he did not think of his eidolons, and they did not come to trouble him. He woke in the morning, asking himself, bitterly, if he were cured already. His humiliation was such that he closed his eyes to the light, and wished he might never again open them to it. The question that Mrs. Yarrow had to ask Dr. Enderby was not the question he had instantly forecast for her when she put aside her veil in his office and told him who she was. She did not seem anxious to be assured of Alford's mental condition, or as to any risks in marrying him. Her inquiry was much more psychological; it was almost impersonal, and yet Dr. Enderby thought she looked as if she had been crying. She had a difficulty in formulating her question, and when it came it was almost a speculation. "Women," she said, a little hoarsely, "have no right, I suppose, to expect the ideal in life. The best they can do seems to be to make the real look like it." Dr. Enderby reflected. "Well, yes. But I don't know that I ever put it to myself in just those terms." Then she remarked, as if that were the next thing: "You've known Mr. Alford a long time." "We were at school together, and we shared the same rooms in Harvard." "He is very sincere," she added, as if this were relevant. "He's a man who likes to have a little worse than the worst known about him. One might say he was excessively sincere." Enderby divined that Alford had been bungling the matter, and he was willing to help him out if he could. Mrs. Yarrow fixed dimly beautiful eyes upon him. "I don't know," she said, "why it wouldn't be ideal--as much ideal as anything--to give one's self absolutely to--to--a duty--or not duty, exactly; I don't mean that. Especially," she added, showing a light through the mist, "if one wanted to do it." Then he knew she had made up her mind, and though on some accounts he would have liked to laugh with her, on other accounts he felt that he owed it to her to be serious. "If women could not fulfil the ideal in that way--if they did not constantly do it--there would be no marriages for love." "Do you think so?" she asked, with a shaking voice. "But men--men are ideal, too." "Not as women are--except now and then some fool like Alford." Now, indeed, he laughed, and he began to praise Alford from his heart, so delicately, so tenderly, so reverently, that Mrs. Yarrow laughed too before he was done, and cried a little, and when she rose to leave she could not speak; but clung to his hand, on turning away, and so flung it from behind her with a gesture that Enderby thought pretty. At this point, Wanhope stopped as if that were the end. "And did she let Alford come to see her again?" Rulledge, at once romantic and literal, demanded.