'I am wondering,' he cried, 'wondering! trying to pierce to your mind, your peopled memory, your present occupation, your science. What do you know? what have you heard? What have you seen? You, so young.... Who are not young. How many secrets like the secret of Paul are buried away in your heart? That you will never betray? Do you ever look forward to the procession of your life? You, so young. I think you have some extraordinary, instinctive, inherited wisdom, some ready-made heritage, bequeathed to you by generations, that compensates for the deficiencies of your own experience. Because you are so young. And so old, that I am afraid.' 'Poor Julian,' she murmured. A gulf of years lay between them, and she spoke to him as a woman to a boy. He was profoundly shaken, while she remained quiet, gently sarcastic, pitying towards him, who, so vastly stronger than she, became a bewildered child upon her own ground. He had seen death, but she had seen, toyed with, dissected the living heart. She added, 'Don't try to understand. Forget me and be yourself. You are annoying me.' She had spoken the last words with such impatience, that, torn from his speculations, he asked,-- 'Annoying you? Why?' After a short hesitation she gave him the truth,-- 'I dislike seeing you at fault.' He passed to a further bewilderment. 'I want you infallible.' Rousing herself from the chair where she had been indolently lying, she said in the deepest tones of her contralto voice,-- 'Julian, you think me worthless and vain; you condemn me as that without the charity of any further thought. You are right to think me heartless towards those I don't love. You believe that I spend my life in vanity. Julian, I only ask to be taken away from my life; I have beliefs, and I have creeds, both of my own making, but I'm like a ship without a rudder. I'm wasting my life in vanity. I'm capable of other things. I'm capable of the deepest good, I know, as well as of the most shallow evil. Nobody knows, except perhaps Kato a little, how my real life is made up of dreams and illusions that I cherish. People are far more unreal to me than my own imaginings. One of my beliefs is about you. You mustn't ever destroy it. I believe you could do anything.' 'No, no,' he said, astonished. But she insisted, lit by the flame of her conviction. 'Yes, anything. I have the profoundest contempt for the herd--to which you don't belong. I have believed in you since I was a child; believed in you, I mean, as something Olympian of which I was frightened. I have always known that you would justify my faith.' 'But I am ordinary, normal!' he said, defending himself. He mistrusted her profoundly; wondered what attack she was engineering. Experience of her had taught him to be sceptical.