"What you have said is true, after a fashion," Margaret answered. "But the inner feelings you speak of, the real self, which a woman confides to the man she likes rather than to a woman, these are generally her ideal feelings, her ideal self; what she thinks she feels, or hopes to feel, rather than the actual feeling; what she wishes to be, rather than what she is. She may or may not attain her ideal; but in the mean time she is judged, by those of her own sex at least, according to her present qualities, what she has already attained; what she is practically, and every day." "So you think it is her ideals that Garda has confided to me? What sort of an ideal was Lucian Spenser!" "Garda is an exception; she has no ideals." "Oh! don't make her out so disagreeable." "I couldn't make her out disagreeable even if I should try," answered Margaret. "All I mean is that her nature is so easy, so sunny, that it has never occurred to her to be discontented; and if you are contented you don't have ideals." "Now you are making her out self-complacent." "No, only simple; richly natural and healthy. She puts the rest of us (women, I mean) to shame--the rest of us with our complicated motives, and involved consciences." "I hope you don't mean to say that Garda has no conscience?" Margaret looked up; she saw that he was smiling. "She has quite enough for her happiness," she answered, smiling too. But in spite of the smile he detected a melancholy in her tone. And this he instantly resented. For he would never allow that it was owing to her conscientiousness--her conscience, in short--that Margaret Harold's married life had been what it was; that sort of conscientiousness was odious. "Don't imagine that I admire conscience," he remarked. "Too much of it makes an arid desert of a woman's life. A woman of that sort, too, makes her whole family live in the desert!" Margaret made no reply to this. She left him and went to find Mrs. Rutherford.