"Besides," she went on, "I couldn't make you happy. It isn't in my power--you don't really care for me. You are in love with a memory, not with me. I'm no longer the woman you fell in love with. I've changed. Really I didn't know how much I had changed till you came here, I must like you very much to want to talk to you--because you make me feel elderly, you do indeed." "You're unjust," he exclaimed--and he was genuinely distressed. "Not care for you? You don't believe it, you can't believe that. I swear to you----" "No, don't," she said. "I can imagine all you would say. Haven't I listened to you? Haven't I even ... tried to make illusions for myself? You talk of what you felt for me, not of what you feel. You don't know it, but you rave to me about what I was, not about what I am. You remember the hat and the frock I had on twenty years ago--can you tell me what I wore last night?" "Is such constancy nothing?" he cried hastily. "It would be irresistible," she said, "if you could find the girl that you've been constant to. But she doesn't live, Con--she's gone. _I_ am such a different person from the girl you've looked for that--that I've even felt a tiny bit jealous sometimes of your rhapsodies to me about her. Well? I'm being quite frank with you, you see. It's pathetic, I think. There have been moments when I've listened to you and felt a little pained because you seemed to forget all about me.... I am hurting you?" "You hurt me," said Conrad, "because for the first time I realise you _are_ different from the girl I've looked for. Till now I've felt that I was with her again." "That's nice of you, but it isn't true. Oh, I like you for saying it, of course.... If you had felt it really----" "Go on." "No, what for? I should only make you unhappier." "You want comedy?" he demurred; "you have said the saddest things a woman ever said to me!" She raised a white shoulder--with a laugh; "I never get what I want!" "It should have taught you to feel for me, but you are not 'wondrous kind.'" "Oh, I am more to be pitied than you are! What have I got in my life? Friends? Yes--to play bridge with. My husband? He delivers speeches on local option, and climbs mountains. Both make me deadly tired. I used to go in for music--'God save the King' is the only tune he knows when he hears it, and he only knows that because the men take their hats off. I was interested in my house at the beginning--after you've quarrelled in your house every day for years it doesn't absorb you to make the mantelpiece look pretty. I wanted a child--well, my sister has seven! ... Voilà my autobiography up to date." "There is to-morrow," said Conrad, moved. "To-morrow you must give me the comedy," she smiled; "and the morning after, I go to the Highlands--and big men will shoot little birds, and think it's 'sport.' Did you ever see a sparrow die? I watched one once. It was human. Like a child! ... Come on, come on, let's go out!"